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Have you used remote assistance ?

  • Article

I wanted to demonstrate something on my machine to somebody in another location.

Using remote assistance is easy. It allows another person to view and/or control your computer from another location. Try it with yourself (the term hermaphrodite comes to mind) if you have 2 computers on a network.

Start Help And Support, Remote Assistance. Invite yourself by typing in your email address. Change the contact information if desired, set a password and invitation expiration time. An email with an attachment (RcBuddy.MsRcIncident) will be sent to your inbox. (You may get some virus warnings like a program is trying to send email or is accessing your address book.) Open the attachment and you’re on your way! The remote machine won’t be able to do anything on the host machine until “Take Control” is chosen and the host machine confirms with a messagebox.

The escape key is annoying. If you hit it while you have remote control, a messagebox comes up saying that you’ve lost control. (See Solving a customer problem (by Calvinh))

Play around with the “Scale to Window” and “Actual Size” options on the remote machine. If the remote machine’s screen resolution is not big enough to show the entire window, it can be scaled down to fit.

You may have firewall issues if there are firewalls in between.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 15, 2005
    Tryed it. couldn't get it to work.

    Seriously. THe fact that it requires a MAPI compliant
    mailer and there is now simple way of extracting the connect information so it can be passed to hand to your
    Remote desktop client is key.

    My clients use many diffene t operating systems and mailers, and I only have space for one computer on my desktop. This makes it difficult ot use remote assistance, even though I can use Remote desktop.

    However I;ve just decided to use vnc for everybody instead. It is much simpler to make work.,,
  • Anonymous
    August 15, 2005
    It's been a long time since I've tried Remote Assistance so I can't tell you exactly why it wasn't easy but it wasn't easy. It seems like it wanted me to have MSN Messenger installed or Outlook Express or something like that. It was very annoying.
  • Anonymous
    August 16, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2005
    It works fine for me. But, it did require I login to MS Messenger and then sent my Invite via MS Outlook. Fortunately, I have those and use them regularly.

    When I used the Invite from another PC, it didn't require MS Messenger or Outlook, so it wasn't any problem at all to make it work. You can be in View Only mode or actually Take Control of the other PC, if the operator of the other PC allows you to do so. It works pretty darn well.

    Compared to PCAnywhere usage, it's a bit clunky. But, the price is a lot cheaper then PCAnywhere.

    I use PCAnywhere 11.0 regularly and have no issues with it whatsoever. I also use Remote Desktop Connection to attach to other PCs on the 'net, but that doesn't give me the interactive session access that PCAnywhere or Remote Assistance can give me. Remote Desktop Connection is a Terminal Services session where I login to the PC and have my own Desktop.

    Nonetheless, this is cool technology and all of these tools have their place.
  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2005
    Ater looking beyond the obvious, I see that you don't in fact need MS Messenger or Outlook to setup Remote Assistance. I didn't look any further because Ihave both typically.

    However, if you look more closely at what is offered to you, you don't need both MS Messenger and Outlook. You could use one or the other. The "Or" pgrase is clearly posted there.

    But, better than all that is the fact that right below the Outlook choice is the ability to save the invitation to a file. You don't need MS Messenger and/or Outlook to do that. Just select it, fill it out, and Save the darn thing. Then it's up to you how you get that file to the user you want to Invite to invade your PC space. Try it. It works.
  • Anonymous
    August 22, 2005
    Just for reference:

    <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;555179&Product=winxp">Windows">http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;555179&Product=winxp">Windows XP SP2 Firewall blocks offers of Remote Assistance</a>
    http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;555179&Product=winxp
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    The comment has been removed