Today I want to talk a bit about Cireson’s newest set of applications, Remote Management. This solution set was long in the making, as it all started with the Remote Manage application plugin for SCCM, which ended up being one of our most downloaded freeware applications for Configuration Manager. With it’s continued popularity we figured it was time to put some real weight behind the application and bring it into the web to make it more accessible to a larger audience within our customers’ organizations. This is how the Remote Management stream of applications was born.
Our desire with Remote Management was to take all of the best features from Remote Manage and improve upon them, all the while making them accessible the larger support organization. In order for that to work, we needed to bring these features into the web where our users were working, apply some complex RBAC capabilities, and do it all on an extensible platform that our users can customize and we can iterate on quickly.
I really believe we’ve met these goals with the 14 new Remote Management apps. I want to walk through the new application features and give a bit of context on what they do and why we chose to build them. Over the next few weeks, we will go through several of these in a series of blog posts. For today, let’s talk about the number one support issue we see in the vast majority of customer environments.
Power to the People
We’ve targeted these apps to Support Analysts, with the primary goal being to bring the power of remote manage to a larger group of users. The features and functionality of each app are designed to touch on some of the biggest pain points a Analyst has to deal with, in a way that the Administrator can control with role-based access to whatever degree the organization requires.
User Management and Password Reset
The end user is the customer of our customer and the most important group in most organizations. These are the users that need access to their Information Technology equipment in order to work and produce the physical and intellectual property that the organization uses to generate revenue. In most cases when a user is out of commission it is a revenue impacting issue.
Taking this a step further, in many support organizations, the top support request usually revolves around access to a customers account, and in most cases, this is a phone call to the support desk because they no longer have access to their computer or email. The Account Control application within the User Management area of Remote Management gives an Analyst immediate access and visibility into the user’s account, helping determine if they are locked, have an expired password, or their account is disabled for some reason. It also provides immediate access to reset the user’s password or unlock the user’s account. All of these options are available in one convenient web-based package which makes for quicker resolution to most user account issues.
Device Management and Remote Actions
Most organizations place their focus on the end user, and rightfully so. As mentioned above, the end user is the real key to revenue generation, regardless of where that end user falls in the organization. Another key aspect of this though is the equipment the end user has in order to access the networks, manage their systems, analyze data, or generate new content. When there is a problem with their computer, ranging from passwords to lack of software, or general instability, your team needs the best tools to efficiently troubleshoot and take action to resolve the issue.
This requirement was top of mind when we set out to determine, design, and develop the new tools for Remote Management. When utilizing the Remote Actions functionality, you have the option to access a remote PowerShell capability directly in the browser. As long as the client is online, and connected to the local network you can run PowerShell commands against it without needing any additional access or tools.
With this incredibly powerful and convenient capability, an Analyst can quickly troubleshoot an end user’s computer utilizing the advanced scripting and command line tools already built into the Windows client for just this purpose, all while staying within the browser with access to all of the other information that is provided there.
Summary
This set of features only highlights two of the 30+ available features, actions, and views that are available in the new Cireson Remote Management suite of applications. These and the other features are all centered around making the lives of your end users and Analysts better through improved troubleshooting and easy access to simple, actionable, support tools.
We’ve shown you only a small subset of the powerful tools already available today, but look forward to future blog posts in this series highlighting other key functionality already in the product, as well as previews for future functionality being added, or the latest functionality being released.
