DEMO: Remote Support Software

A picture is worth a thousand words. Let's say you're providing tech support over the phone to some user. You can't see their screen. They're conveying to you what they're seeing on the screen, and you're conveying to them what you want them to do, and you're conveying all of this through words, which can be difficult. Well, that's where remote support software can come into play. It can really help us visualize what's happening and step somebody through a process.

Supporting a user over the phone

Let's set up a little scenario here. Let's say a user right here calls into help desk and you're there to support them, and all the communication is done through the phone line, so you're not seeing what's on their screen. This user is conveying in words to you what they're seeing, but they're not trained to do that. Maybe they don't have a lot of experience with that, maybe they're not real tech savvy, so what they are saying is confusing and you have to interpret what they're saying. Not to mention it takes a skill to be able to convey back instructions to tell them what to do, and so that can be confusing too, especially if the end user is not technical.

Remote support software helps break down those barriers. Whatever the end user is seeing on their screen gets displayed on your screen. Now suddenly you have a visual, so not only can you step them through the process, because you can see exactly where they're at and what they're doing, but you can also be able to convey when they're not making the correct actions, when they're going to the wrong spot — you can correct them on it. And so it really helps out a lot.

There's two ways that this could work. It could just work that whatever they're seeing gets displayed on your screen. But some of these remote support software — and quite a few of them, actually — allow you to control their screen, if the user accepts that ability for you to control their screen.

RDP

The first one that we're going to take a look at is called Remote Desktop Connection, or at least that's the name of the program that we're going to use. It's going to make an RDP session between these two. So we call it RDP. RDP stands for Remote Desktop Protocol, protocol being the communication that happens between these. You don't need to understand all of this, just think this is RDP. So we're going to make a connection with RDP.

I love RDP, I use it a ton, it really works out for what I need it for. It does have a weakness when it comes to supporting other users, and we're going to take a look at that.

I have these two machines. This is a Windows 2025 server right here, and this one right here is a Windows 11 desktop, and we're going to make a connection from the Windows 11 desktop to this server right here. So pretend this server is some distance away — maybe it's in another state, maybe it's in another country. We're going to make a connection to it, and then we're going to be able to edit it and change things.

So I've got the hello, a text file right here. I just put in test 1 2 3 4 5 — we'll just put in that right there so we can see it on the other end. I'm going to close this out and save it, and now let's make a connection to this machine and see what that looks like.

To do that I'm going to jump onto this Windows 11 machine. I'm going to open up the start menu and I'm going to type in remote desktop connection, and there's the app that we're going to use, so I'll hit enter. I'm going to do the IP address, which is 192.168 4241 — we can see that that's the IP address here. So I'm going to connect into it, so I'll connect and we'll give it a second here. It's asking for a password and going through the connection process.

The biggest thing that I want to show you is notice that when I logged in onto this machine — and we can see that hello document on the front of this, and there's the 1 2 3 4 5, and we'll say six on here — so I've successfully logged in, but notice it logged out on this other machine. So for my purposes this works great, this is not a problem at all. But if you're helping support an end user, that might not be desirable. So there are other programs that we can use to help this process and do this process.

Notice I can minimize this, or I can open it up, to toggle between this Windows 11 machine and this server right here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to this window right here, and we're going to send it a Control-Alt-Delete in, and notice I get this message: you've been disconnected. So it's not allowing me to do both at the same time.

TightVNC

So now I'm back to here. I'm going to close out of this. What I've done is I've installed a program on here called TightVNC. We can see the TightVNC server right here, so this is the TightVNC service that's running on here, and I have a TightVNC client over here.

So we're going to get on to the TightVNC viewer, and I'm going to type in the IP address, and we're going to say connect, and let's see what happens here. I do have a password on this, so let me just jump in and get that password, and with the password in there I'm going to hit okay.

And now I'm on the desktop right here, but notice as I'm moving the mouse around, now it's moving it around on both devices. So I can see that I'm seeing the same thing with this. In fact, let me open up hello — now I'm going to open up hello, and it opens up on both windows. So as you can see, what I have is I have control over this computer.

Now, this is more ideal when you're talking with a lot of users. Sometimes they don't necessarily need to know what you're doing and help you through the process, but sometimes you need to see what they're doing, or perhaps you need to just take control and be able to control it. So TightVNC allows us to do that, and there's lots of different software that allows us to make this type of connection where we're both seeing the same thing and I can take control over that session.

TeamViewer

Now, both RDP and VNC are great to do this with, although there are better programs out there that can help users out. One example of this would be like TeamViewer. So this is TeamViewer right there, and TeamViewer is a way that you can remote control somebody else's machine. What they would do is you'd instruct them to go to some set website, maybe download a client — some, not all of them, necessarily have to have that client download.

In fact, it's kind of scary. I've used some applications, specifically TeamViewer and some other applications, to help do a remote control session with them, and it's kind of scary what you can allow somebody else to do on your computer using applications like this. All they need to do is just hit one button and now you have access to their computer.

So this is a software that, if you were a business and you were wanting to help people remotely, you would subscribe to a service like this, and then you would use this software to help people out and give them support by maybe taking control of their computer, or just seeing what they're seeing. And it really helps this troubleshooting process out.

The three options

We have RDP, which is the one that I use the most. I love it and it works great, and a lot of system administrators use it to remote administer different machines. They'll RDP into a machine and then control that machine, doing what they want. The biggest flaw with it though is that it will log whoever's on the other side out of the system, and we don't always want that.

So VNC is an option that we can have to be able to see what's happening on both screens at the same time — whoever's logged in locally and whoever is logging in remotely. So that's a great option, although I can tell you I haven't used VNC in a long time. Instead I've used things like TeamViewer if I'm helping support somebody else, because what that allows me to do is make a connection and walk somebody through the process of fixing something, all done through the cloud, all done through a third-party app. All I need to do is give them a little code, they go to that site and type in that code, and then I'm able to help them out with their machine.

So those are a few great options that you can have out there. There's lots of other options that are out there.