Texas-Sized Support

Help Desk Support at Texas A&M University

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
Let me walk through a little bit of just how it works. As Mike said, it only uses standard ports 80 and 443 for the rep and for the customer you normally install the client in the DMZ or demilitarized zone. And then, from then on you don't have to worry any further about firewall configuration or anything like that once you've made the appliance accessible initially. Which means that, whether you're supporting the guy down the hall on the same subnet or the guy in Tokyo on a Wi-Fi hotspot connection, you don't have to worry about what firewall they're behind, whether or not it's been configured correctly, or any other specifics about the system itself.

So, this is just a little bit about how you would initiate a connection. With our latest version, the support rep monitors the queue waiting for incoming sessions. And then, the user would initiate a session. There's three different ways for the user to initiate a session. I believe that Mike and his team are normally using the first way which is to click on a display name. There's a second way which is to enter a session key which the rep would provide. And, we've also introduced a third method which is for the customer to send a support request ticket. And then, that ticket is entered into a queue that is monitored by your reps and so they can take it off the queue and address that issue. And, all of these are configurable by the administrator as to which ones appear and which ones don't. So, you can use one or more of these initiation methods.

So, once the user initiates the session. They would then grant the remote control session to the rep. This is always user initiated so there is no way for the rep to gain control of the user's PC without the user's express permission. And, that's important also once the session is ended, to have the solution completely removed from their system. This also means from the administrator's perspective that you don't have to maintain a client-based software instillation across hundreds or thousands of PCs. That you're only installing that little piece of software for the duration session and then it's completely removed so you're not worried about whether or not something's installed or configured appropriately.