Supporting the Widespread Campus:

Remote Support at the Ohio State University

Nathan McNeill - VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
We usually - we tell our customers to take the Bomgar™ pizza box challenge, which is to, you know, when you get the appliance box, order a pizza. By the time the pizza gets there, you should have the appliance installed and up and running. It really is that simple.

This is how it works. It's all outbound connections on standard Web ports 443 and 80. And so it does not require any firewall configuration either for the rep, or for the customer.

When you're installing the appliance, you need to make it available on the Internet via ports 443 and 80, but beyond that point there's zero configuration. So your customer, all they do is go to Web site, click on link and give you control. And the rep, likewise, can log in from any location, whether he's at home or in the office.

And you can also control a Mac or a PC with our latest 9.1 release, so it really does allow you to control your entire user base. The way it works, the support rep would monitor the queue waiting for incoming connections. And these support sessions can come in.

There's three different ways to initiate the session. One would be for the user, as you'll see at the top, to click on a display name of the rep. The second option would be for the user to enter a session key, which the rep would supply - the unique session key. And the third option is for the customer to basically fill out a support request form, which would then be entered into the rep's queue.

And that can be associated with a particular team of reps. So, if you have a team that is responsible for monitoring, or for supporting a different group of support requests, you can route those requests to that team.