Supporting the Widespread Campus:

Remote Support at the Ohio State University

Duane Rigsby - Assistant Manager & Coordinator, Ohio State University South Centers:
We've also tried to use VNC and such to make this happen, and it just wasn't quite acceptable for a tech. You would click on something and you would wait and wait and wait, and this seems to be much quicker. The flow is absolutely great on that part.

Using - what we use Bomgar™ for is, a lot of the times we do one-on-one training. And when I say training, we do - I might have a user call me up and they'll say, "Duane, I need some help with an Excel file, and how do you get this formula to work correctly?" or something and we'll just say, "Yeah, let's do a session now and we'll - I'll show you how to do that."

And they might be two and a half hours away, and that's where those easy problems are solved. We don't have to drive there and show 'em, and it might be a little harder to troubleshoot over the phone when you're talking to an educator that isn't really tech savvy or such that they don't know what we're talking about when we say a different kind of formula or something. And that's been a great help to us on that on doing one-on-one things.

Some of the other stuff we do - a bulk purchase on computers. We bring 'em into the office. We set 'em up, get 'em everything pretty much ready to go. We ship 'em out to the counties. They plug 'em into their network. They should be all patched up and secure, and all that stuff.

But then we'll do a remote session to it, bring over their other files, bring over their email, set up - do - just do the final installation of the new computer. And we don't have to drive there, maybe it's only one machine or something. And that helps as well because we can also be working in the office and all of the sudden do a Bomgar session to another user, install their machine, be ready to go.