I use a remote support tool at work for occasional device driver installation and repair. The driver sucks and I have no control over that, but believe me when I tell you that it’s easier for me to just remote in and fix it than to try to walk someone through the process.
The current remote support product I’m using is as shitty as the driver I’m supporting. The company pays $25/month for a program that somehow connects to a 10mbps connection on the client side and turns it into a 33.6k analog modem. This is very slight hyperbole. It is truly awful.
I would love to use TeamViewer, but the commercial license fee is pretty steep. $800 for a single concurrent user on maximum 3 devices. I’m not even close to full time support but I definitely use remote support way, way more than anyone else in the company. Maybe 10-15 sessions per month. I don’t need video or file transfer or any other bells or whistles.
Ability to embed a link in our website that would launch a client app would be swell, but not a requirement. Single concurrent user with generous or unlimited number of devices is a strong want. Mostly, I just need a low overhead app that is easy for clients to launch and doesn’t cost $800.
I would think even the built in Remote Desktop and Remote Assistance in Windows would work better than that.
A product I really like for my home use is SplashTop, and their SplashTop Business offers seem a lot better priced: $60/year for 1 person and 10 computers. SplashTop specializes in being quite responsive–it’s their main selling point. You can watch video from the client with it.
On the free side, there’s UltraVNC. Follow the link to read up on it.
Considering your specific situation, I’d also maybe consider writing an AutoHotkey script if it’s you repeating the same actions over and over. You could turn it into something where all they have to do is double click on an icon. Surely they could handle that…
Two commonly used alternatives are WebEx and Glance.
If you’re handling device drivers remotly, with Device Manager and all that, go with Glance. WebEx tends to lose remote control of the mouse when using elevated privileges (UAC).
ETA: Still, none of these tools ever gives you as much throughput as you would expect given today’s bandwidth. There’s always a bottleneck somewhere, it seems.
For my work, we use LogMeIn. I’m not privvy to the licensing details, but it’s throughput has been excellent, especially for remote users where Microsofts own SCCM remote control viewer fails to work either due to VPN or bandwidth issues.
It also gracefully handles UAC privilege escalation.
As Heracles mentions, WebEx Support doesn’t handle UAC elevations (The best we could do was to get it to show the log in prompt for the elevation, but we still couldn’t interact with it).
Everything that is not teamviewer is just too much work. Bite the bullet and get your boss to invest the $800. It will save money in the long run.
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Thank you for your input 14 months after the fact. On the contrary, Splashtop has turned out to be an excellent choice. After over a year of use, I don’t have a single complaint.
$200/year for 50 computers, no concurrent user restrictions. TeamViewer is $850 for single user, $1690 for single concurrent user, $2800 for 3 concurrent users. There is nothing at all complicated about Splashtop. There is not too much work, there is no work. There is no noticeable lag and I haven’t had a single moment of frustration in using it that wasn’t caused by the user on the other side of the connection.
To get the same level of use as we have with Splashtop, my company would be paying $2800 for TeamViewer. Fourteen times the cost of Splashtop, annually. As a no-frills remote support tool at a fraction of the cost of TeamViewer, I recommend it without any hesitation.
We have used logmein for about 10 years, and I wholeheartedly without reservation recommend the product.
We have 300 machines, from XP to Windows 10, on connections from 100meg to a cell-phone, and without fail, it works well.
They’ve upped their costs over the years, but the Logmein Central works for us. We use it to remote into machines and fix users problems. We install it on all new machines we issue, with admin already installed, so we don’t need the users’ permission to take over.