We have had numerous attempts at trying to find the right solution that suits us and our customers needs for technical support. We often get it right but remote support has been one of the harder things to implement. Firstly it was a technical barrier, we hope now it will just be a training barrier.
We are trying to implement remote support using a mash up of technologies that makes it as easy as possible for a teacher to get instant support. We aim to roll it out fully in the next 6 months. We are using the Google Talk protocol with the pidgin client on desktop machines and the google talk client on mobile devices.
Here is a screen shot of the interface:
If you recieve support from us for a paid product then get in touch if you want to try it out early on.
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Are you actually using Google Talk, or just plain jabber? For running custom support chats like this I’d much rather run my own Jabber server with Openfire or similar which would give me easy ability to hook into other systems. We ran a jabber server with AD-scripted installations of client software for a while and we were pretty pleased with the results.
Initially just Google Talk, this is to lower the barrier of adoption. I look at a server/client style deployment and figured initially it was too much overhead for what should be a relatively simple and small deployment. All of our clients are in separate AD environments so doing a scripted deployment would be a bit of a big job!