Supporting the Widespread Campus:

Remote Support at the Ohio State University

Duane Rigsby - Assistant Manager & Coordinator, Ohio State University South Centers:
So that's one of the big things that we looked at and other ways of supporting it. We wanted to be able to start looking at updating machines. We know with the way Windows and everything is covered with patches and things nowadays. You can't get to one county to the other without doing remote support anymore.

So, let's see, the - some of the hurdles that we started looking at for the reasoning why we went to remote support system was our travel budget. The cost of gas is ever going up and down and back and forth. The drive time from getting from one county to the other, if you - if we went back to that map, and you seen that one person has to almost literally go from north to south on the west side. It takes three plus hours, four hours to get from one county to the next - and especially with a small problem.

You know, our clients, our educators and stuff. If they had just a small problem say with email or something, but that's really to getting to be a major program for us that, you know, people have to have their email off and on. That - you know, that was a major thing, but to drive two, three hours plus just to fix a problem that may only take us five or ten minutes was out of the question . So a lot of times we put that off until we had either enough problems there, or our schedule would allow us to drive to that county and fix the problem.

But now with this remote support, Bomgar™, we can do that now. It's just been a huge turnaround for us in how quick we can get these problems solved.

Some of the solutions here, requirements that we looked at when we started doing - when we looked into the product was to be able to do a remote reboot of an end user's computer. And now what that consists of that we, you know, we wanted was that we didn't want somebody sitting there, or the client sitting there at their computer while maybe we had to do a restart or install some software and ended up the software do a restart.