Supporting the Widespread Campus:

Remote Support at the Ohio State University

Duane Rigsby - Assistant Manager & Coordinator, Ohio State University South Centers:
We wanted to be able to get right back to that machine after a reboot. In other previous software we looked at, you had to have the end user sit there, connect your remote software back, or turn it on and then it would come back to you and log in. But, we wanted to be able to, you know, eliminate that person because they've got other things they can do in the office and such. So that's where the reboot came to be such a great benefit to us. And one of the, you know, the real selling points for the software.

We also wanted it to be set up and ready to go, you know, right out of the box, and it was. It was a great product for that. We had to do literally no setup because it was ready.

We only have two developers in our college that can - that do large support like this that can develop remote software and such like that. And it would've taken them several hours and several days to come up with a solution for us, and we didn't want to burden them with our medium to large problem that we were starting to have, but they had tons of other issues that they had to work with as well. So that's why we went to external to try to fix - to come up with a solution.

An easy remote connection for the end user, we wanted them to be able to just, you know, go to a Web page or go to a file that we could send 'em, and click on it and really that's all they do. And that's what this came about was to easily connect to this software. You just go to a Web site, or to a Web page, you click on your name or, for instance, my name and it would almost literally walk - it walks you through the steps of installing their - the little client, and so you can do the remote support.

And the client is such a lightweight client. It's very small in size, that it installs quick, especially over different networks. It has probably on dial-up it only takes a minute or less to install. And to be able to work over dialup because we do have a few counties that do have dial-up support that we - or dial-up Internet that we still have because they can't get broadband, yet, at their location.