Texas-Sized Support

Help Desk Support at Texas A&M University

Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
And, lastly, the users control their own desktops. It's an educational environment, free will and control is very important to our researchers and administrators. And so, users can control and set up their own desktop, and we frequently encounter a new and interesting software and set ups. And, as many of you know, users don't always tell you accurately what they're seeing on the screen. And, being able to see what's on the screen overcomes a number of those hurdles for us. Lastly, we control none of the firewalls. A&M University system controls the firewall. We'll talk a little bit later about setting up the appliance. That's the only thing that we had to set up. But, basically, the system connects in client server mode and so we don't have to worry about firewall issues and a fragmented network; the topology makes, as far as we can tell, no difference over how people connect with Bomgar™. In addition, we support users working from home.

Got to have TCP/IP. One of the issues that we had when we were looking at a solution was that it had to be able to use TCP/IP. It had to not care about what software was already installed on a machine or how the machine was connected to the internet. The other thing is that our users do not really care for resident software that's running on their machine that let's us connect when they don't know we're doing it. And, this was an important security feature for us. That's why we said must not be resident on a client's PC. There is one exception in the whole A&M University system that I'm aware of where they're using a remote control product that is resident on their PC. New PCs arrive from a variety of sources. And, many of our users when we're working on them are freed up and they can't stand by while we're working on their machine. So, we have to be able to use a product that acts just like we're sitting there. The only thing we can't do is hit the power switch. But, we can remotely reboot it and it automatically connects back to your representative's client. In addition, if you have a network outage and it lasts a short enough period of time, 'cause we have a time out set on our sessions, then it will automatically connect back up if there was a network outage. It's very robust in that and we needed that capability to walk through all of our different network configurations.