Texas-Sized Support

Help Desk Support at Texas A&M University

Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
The other thing that's not on this list is we have used Bomgar™ in performing a security audit on select PCs at the request of administrative faculty. Our people out in West Texas used to have what we call quality windshield time driving from one location to another. And, although they have cell phones and even wireless PCs, they're not fully productive as they drive down the road. It's not fully wasted time because they can help people, but now our IT people can provide more timely resolution at more sites with Bomgar™. It used to be that some of our problems could not be handled over the phone and our users had to wait until our IT person could drive onsite. Oftentimes that has to be scheduled. Not anymore. If they have a working internet connection then most often that problem can be remotely resolved. And, this includes even some tricky problems with viruses and worms that might require several reboots in order to get it to work.

I have some of our IT faculty who are scheduling multiple Bomgar™ sessions with the county so they can work remotely on all the PCs. And, the way they used to do by having to drive on site, but they now do it from their office and they schedule several counties to be done on the same day. They used to not be able to do it. They'd get one county done one day and then move over to the next. Lastly, the clientele have learned that we have this capability. They used to let the problems stack up and when our IT people walked in the office, they were there to resolve a problem they knew about, but quite a few would be presented to them after they got there. Sort of a list - a laundry list of problems to be solved. Now that our clientele recognize that we can solve the problem when it occurs they will call it. We remotely fix that problem. We may look for other maintenance issues and we typically do. We look to see if their virus definitions are updated or not. But, we have found that when they call us as soon as the problem occurs and we need to fix it, it decreases one of the ripple effects that an unresolved problem might lead to another, and another, and a more serious problem.