Support staff (on the road) supporting clients (on the road)

[cbolourchi]

Hello,

I work for a point of sale company and am trying to implement a new support infrastructure. We have a few hundred sites across the country, with 1 terminal (POS software on an xp box) per site. I have support personal that are either A) in the office B) working from home C) working on the road. I need a way for my support staff, in all three locations, to be able to supply support to all of the sites across the country. I.E. no need for router configuration on both client and support side.

I’ve been working with UVNC SC a lot, and it satisfies half of that requirement, the client side. But the program seems to be designed around the fact that the support staff remains stationary, while clients are mobile. I would like to know if anyone has heard of a program or a hosting service where a mobile support team can supply tech support to various locations across the country. These locations would remain for as little as 2 days to as much as several months, before being redeployed at our main office.

Up until now, we’ve been using logmein.com, but would like to switch over to something that we can host and take responsibility for ourselves.

Ideas or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Cameron

[mod=494,1210364555]moved from vnc related product to general help[/mod]

[tomWoP]

HI

If I understand your question correctly, you want to have mobile support personal accessible to customers.

You mentioned you are using UVNC SC, and I assume your customers make the contact to a static IP address called out in the Helpdesk.txt file.

If this is how you are set up the solution is pretty easy. Get a No-IP account, they have a free account but I recommend the $9.95/yr account, since the free account only allows one IP address. I believe the $9.95/yr account allows five URL addresses.

Set up as many Static URL addresses required, they have many to choose from. Then in your Helpdesk.txt file insert each new address in a separate HOST line.

For example:

[HOST]
Support 1
-connect www.firstaccount.myvnc.com:5500 -noregistry

[HOST]
Support 2
-connect www.nextaccount.myvnc.com:5500 -noregistry

The lines “Support 1” and “Support 2” would be the identifying name you require for the individual tech support members. You can add as many as you need.

The “-connect www.firstaccountt.myvnc.com:5500 -noregistry” etc., would be the url’s you setup at No-IP.com As I mentioned, they have many to choose from and the names you pick are transparent to the customers. Only the names you select for the “Support 1” and Support 2”, etc. lines in the above example are available to the customers.

No-IP maintains a database of the URL’s and their current IP address. Your mobile support reps will run a small program on their computers which will notify No-IP when their current IP address changes. No-IP will immediately update their database and your customers will be redirected to the current IP address when they click on a support rep in the Server application generated by the Helpdesk.txt file.


Hope this helps

Tom

[cbolourchi]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for your reply, I think your method is great. I just wish my boss would make up his mind, he keeps changing the parameters every five minutes.
He's actually looking for something similar to logmein, but not logmein (if that makes any sense), in that support personnel (or store owners) can access the client screen through the internet, rather than the other way around. If possible, he would like to have both in one with no router configuring on either side.
Thank you once again for your reply, Tom.

Cameron