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Remote support consists of our connecting our computers using the Internet to permit our technical support person to share your screen for demonstrations and problem analysis.
This service requires a high speed (cable/DSLl/fiber) Internet connection.
Without an Internet connection, you can still use H2OS, but we will be limited in our ability to help should you experience an outage or problem that we cannot resolve with available diagnostic information. In such situations we will typically provide you with a procedure to run for the purpose of obtaining diagnostic information that you can then send to us by email. We will make a reasonable effort to solve such problems, but if we cannot, then you may need to fall back (restore a backup) your database to a time before the failure. (good time to remind of the importance of taking regular backups!).
Of course, the real solution does depend on the nature of the problem. If, just for example, the underlying problem is that your hard drive is full, then falling back your database wouldn't help the drive from becoming full again.
A prospective customer raised a concern about allowing remote control of their computers for support purposes. Our response is:
Remote control is vastly
superior to all other approaches to technical support. It is the
same approach
that's been used by the "Big Guys", e.g. IBM, for decades and
is now available to the rest of us.
Just knowing that the remote control support option
is available relieves your operator of stress related to understanding
and conveying information about problems that may not be easy to describe,
in addition
to being relieved of the mechanics necessary to solve or work around the
problem.
When our technician is connected for remote control
support, you operator can monitor the screen and actions taken by our
technician. Such sessions are usually (but not always, it depends on the
problem) brief and conducted specifically to duplicate the problem, obtain
diagnostic
information, and/or implement a fix or workaround. During such sessions,
your operator can at any time over-ride mouse movements, typing, and even
disconnect the session if he/she so desires.
Customers who have installed our software have
already trusted us, given there isn't anything we can do by remote control
that we can't do in a program. Thus rejecting the use of remote control
for support purposes is, in effect, not seeing the big picture, and at
the same time shooting ourselves in the foot by not taking advantage of
one of the Internet's most powerful features.
Lastly, we do use the Crossloop program as well as UltraVNC, and the Crossloop program does have a file transfer feature that requires host/client cooperation on each file transferred (as opposed to UltraVNC, which allows the client to send any file anywhere, any number of times). This feature gives you much more control over which files are transferred to your computer, at a cost: it's much slower, and you must acknowledge each and every file transfer, so you may not be able to leave the machine unattended while it's being worked on by our technician.