- Posted by Jakob Andersen on November 23, 2007
Today i had to guide a customer through testing an application on his machine, as the application is supposed to run as a service no UI was made, so he had to interact with the application for testing copying some files around and specifying some parameters on the commandline. However this was a non-technical user and i had to assist a bit during this process.
After a few shots on the phone i grabbed my company's login to gotomeeting which i had only been introduced to in a few lines by email and a short demo at a companymeeting. However it was extremely simple to use:
- I press a button on gotomeeting.com's frontpage
- Login with credentials
- Invite the attende by sending a link(given to you be gotomeeting app) in an email
The customer then just press on the recieved link and in a few moment i can see his/her screen, and by pressing a button he/her can give me control of keyboard and mouse. This really wen't smooth even though there were multiple firewalls and a VPN connection between me and the customer, thats how remote support applications should work.
As a side note, the icon for gotomeeting reminded me of the good old days when ICQ was the defacto instant messenger, thats many spammails ago.
Updated: Microsoft has released a tool called SharedView with similar capabilities and a few more, for instance multiple mouse cursors on screen so each contestant can point for themselves, it can be found here: http://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=94