Cheaper remote support option?

December 5, 2012 10:31 AM

Looking for a replacement to TeamViewer for our corporate remote assistant client.

We currently have TeamViewer 4 QS shortcuts on every machine in the company (150 odd machines). We're running into issues with Windows 7 remote assistance and would like to upgrade, however, they're looking for $700 per seat upgrade fee for version 8. We'd need 4 remote licenses. That seems like a ton of cash to us and we'd like to evaluate options before committing to this.

Anybody have experience with lower-priced alternatives?


- We're about 50/50 Win7/XP. We have no intention of going to Win 8 at this point, so that isn't important.

- Having some kind of mobile support client would be awesome for IOS and Android, but not pivotal.

- Having a easy to download quick support file for remote users home machines is very important.

-Being able to deploy in the background would be great, so I don't have to drop a shortcut on 150 machines.

Thanks!

posted by lattiboy to computers & internet (7 answers total)

Might not Logmein be a good possible alternative?
posted by Dansaman at 10:39 AM on December 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

I should add that ease of deployment is near the top of our list for this. My experience with logmein was that it involved quite a bit of machine interaction to run. The great thing about TeamViewer is that a simple 2MB file can be run without an install and give you a secured connection.
posted by lattiboy at 10:42 AM on December 5, 2012

How about Remote Utilities (haven't used it myself) or GoToMyPC (link goes to their different price plans including corporate)?
posted by Dansaman at 10:47 AM on December 5, 2012

At work we use Logmein Rescue for remote troubleshooting; I think it's Logmein's tech-support oriented offering.
posted by reptile at 11:12 AM on December 5, 2012

Bomgar is really nice to use/deploy. It's a device you host locally and it's been pretty easy to have people log into it and get help. I have no idea how much i costs, but we used it at a previous job and it worked really well to support people all over the state including machines we never saw before.
posted by advicepig at 12:21 PM on December 5, 2012

How about ammyy or a reverse-vnc with ultravnc-sc (doc) ? I've had good results with both, although ammyy is obviously less secure.

There is also gitso which seems ok, but I haven't tried it.
posted by motdiem2 at 12:38 PM on December 5, 2012

There's the Citrix solution, which is called GoToAssist. I used GoToAssist Express several years ago when troubleshooting a friend's machine and it installed easily. Pretty sure you won't have to put a shortcut on every machine if a user is present at the machine...
posted by antonymous at 3:17 PM on December 5, 2012