We use ConnectWise Control as a great remote access tool.
The primary support or the remote access support is really what we use ConnectWise Control for, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Even people outside of the organization would benefit from this. We do push out the agents, but if somebody, for whatever reason, like our board of trustees, don't have the agent on their computer, we can create a support session so they can just join via a web browser and we can support them in the same manner. It's very handy. It's very beneficial.
It also has the ability to have online meetings, like a WebEx scenario.
I haven't really played around with it too much, but what they refer to, what ConnectWise calls the unattended access, I would say is easily 80% to 90% of what we've used here and in previous lives, so it's really great.
This solution is very feature rich. It has a Wake-on-LAN ability.
You can also run commands against the machines, e.g. for old guys like me who prefer that instead of the fancy GUIs. It's similar to a DOS window where you can run different types of commands against it.
It does come in handy if you just want to do something in the background, e.g. schedule reboots, and you don't want to become too invasive to what the user's doing. Especially in our situation, a lot of times they're teaching a class and it's like: "Ugh. We don't want this to pop up." They've got their laptops connected to an interactive display most of the time, so they don't need to see what's going on in the background. It's pretty awesome.
I also like the fact that it does do an audit, so you can see who's connected to the machine. If somebody, every once in a while, and this isn't exclusive to ConnectWise Control, we'll get a call saying: "Hey. Something's not right with my machine. The mouse is moving on its own...", and we take a look, and sure enough: One of the support agents has taken control.
That's the draw back of any type of unattended access: They can just do that, so I've always put in a policy saying: "Hey. You need to make sure that you have the user's permission before connecting to their machine just so: A. You don't freak them out, and B. They know what you're doing." The audit trail on that is very good. It can show that.
The other nice thing is it has a two-way instant messaging feature built in, so if you're trying to communicate with somebody who maybe doesn't have a phone or whatever the case may be, you can type messages back and forth. This is a nice feature too.
The ability to block guest input is really good. If you are connected to somebody's machine and you're working on it, e.g. you're just on your screen Googling something and then they take the mouse and start moving it around, and you'll have to tell them: "No, don't do that. Don't close that."
You can block them from having control, so you're not fighting over control, e.g. mouse control. Another example is if you have the need to enter a password with additional access, e.g. an admin password, you can blank out their monitor so they can't see what you're typing. That's very, very handy because you don't want the end user to be able to get that password, and if you mistakenly type it in the username field, it will be in plain text. It'll be there until you do your password change.