>>My business card says Lead Helpdesk Analyst but
what I really am is executive support for my organization.
My role is to help those leaders so that they do not have
those pain points and they can accomplish their objectives.
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I'm all over the building. I might be at my desk.
[crickets chirping]
Sometimes. Or I might be running around helping others.
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I would say there is a certain sense of pride,
of being trusted to work on CEO's laptop, CFO's laptop,
anyone with high visibility.
There is that internal challenge
with mixing pride and also having the confidence and having
developed that trust in that end user that they
trust you to do that right before an important deadline
or before getting on some kind of VidCon call.
I think that there's natural ebbs and
flow in a business, there's [ding] external forces.
Oh sorry, hold on, message, I can't turn that off.
I think there's natural external forces as technology
changes so fast so people's needs change so fast.
You always have to deal with change and you always
have to deal with changing in processes as well.
[knocking] Hey is my computer done yet?
Oh yeah, it's right here, come on over here.
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So today we're gonna look at
SolarWinds Take Control and here's the console menu.
You can actually see up here there's pending requests.
Right now we don't have any pending requests,
so we don't have any users trying to ping into us.
And under active users you can see some of
our team over here and you can actually see if they have
any active sessions in place right now and as you
can see they're not. So, that's a good thing and
no one needs help right now from a remote standpoint.
Today I'm gonna use, I'm gonna start a new session.
I've created a couple problems
so we're gonna look at them today.
So we're gonna start a new session.
Now we've prompted our, or initiated our new session.
So, we have a couple options here.
We can provide a PIN code that a user can kick off
once they browse to a start control URL. Or, you have
the second option here where you have a direct link,
they can download an .EXE file and install that.
So we're going to, for the sake of this demo,
use a six-digit pin code.
So right now our user's having an issue,
they've reported to me that they're not receiving any
emails so we're gonna take a closer look into that.
So we have our request, right. So, notice before
we didn't have any pending requests, we have one now.
We notice that that's a very familiar laptop
so we're gonna go ahead and accept that, accept.
I'm gonna pull this over to our screen.
Here is our user who told us,
remember, they could not get any emails.
So let's close this, actually before I close this
console here's the link that was available in the console
to provide to the user so that they can either
enter a code or a calling card so that you can
define a longer period of time that they can
grant access and you notice up here
something kind of exciting, right.
You have a Windows and you have a Mac section
where you can download Applets.
So, we can support those Mac users as well.
So, we're gonna go ahead and close that now.
And we're now, now we're in so we're
gonna do some basic troubleshooting here.
One, we were able to log in so we know
that they have internet connectivity,
so that's not stopping them from getting email.
So, we're gonna open up their Outlook and
hey, something's going on.
This might have been harder to pull from
someone just saying "hey I don't have internet," but
now that we have this visual we're seeing that they're
in offline mode so they must have hit a hot key
by accident or accidentally gone to the Send and
Receive tab and turned on "work offline."
So we're gonna turn that off and then we should
start seeing this synchronizing, perfect.
Okay, and look here they're coming through.
[upbeat music]
I enjoy working from the closest coffee spot,
it's my favorite place to work in the building.
Luckily this building has lots of coffee spots.
My least favorite place to work from is probably inside
a meeting room after there's already an
issue and the meeting's already started.
There has been many times where
remote desktop tools have saved my life,
probably someone else's life, professionally speaking.
Remoting into servers, accessing information, right,
those unintended access to core critical business systems
is one aspect right, and then there's the
individual level where maybe they're in an airport, right,
and we're dealing with sluggish, sluggish connectivity,
some of these bigger tools can be harder to
navigate through to fix the problem.
Everyone needs to be able to look at the
same problem that another individual's having
so that geography, distance, time,
no longer is a barrier to solving that problem.
I've been asked that question on whether I should
walk up to someone's desk or use a remote management tool.
I think that's the wrong question.
I think it's less about a choice of whether I would
prefer to go walk up to a desk or use a
remote management tool and more a question
of what would best serve that person.
If I can fix it with a remote management tool
before I even get to their desk,
why go through that journey?
Is that the best thing for that person?
So, I guess that's the kind of the question
you have to ask yourself in each situation.
What I like about Take Control is it's streamlined.
It doesn't have a bunch of bells and whistles,
it's simple to use and most importantly,
I've never had a challenge with a user being able to give me
access to their device so that I can solve their problems.
We have a user who has notified us that one,
they want to change where there toolbar is populating
on one of their monitors and that their, for some reason,
their displays are duplicating and they can't
figure out how to extend that display.
So we're back here, we see again that the Pending
Request section is empty so we have no computers in queue.
Over under Active Users, none of our techs that are on
here are currently in any sessions and we're
gonna continue to use the New Session option because
we do not need any longterm access,
we don't need to set up any time
for that for our calling card.
So, we're gonna start that new session and we're
going to send that PIN code to our user so that
they can easily grant us that access
so we can take care of their concerns.
All right, so we have our request now,
our user has put in that PIN code and granted us access.
So we have this request coming through and look,
there's a timer so we can see how long they've been waiting.
Hopefully that timer doesn't go on too long.
So we're gonna accept that request.
Oh look, we got a surprise here.
So this is a Mac user, so I had to give a little
more permission than normally to get
remote access but I was able to do that remotely.
So, in this example going back, the user had an issue
with duplicating their screens and
they wanted to move their toolbar.
So we're gonna go to the display section,
move onto Arrangements and we notice
Mirroring Displays is on, so we're gonna uncheck that box.
And we also had this request to move over that Home toolbar.
So we did that, yeah, and so let's look at
how many clicks that was, one, two,
see here, three, four.
How simple was that for us?
How concise was that?
But maybe that wouldn't have been so easy to convey in
an email or over the phone or however
you're communicating with this person.
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[sigh]
Sorry guys, this is the only
place I could find so let's start.
I know I'm gonna have to remote in to a user's desktop
when I'm taking too long, when I feel like I'm
exhausting my options or I feel like I'm trying too
hard to avoid remoting into their desktop, right.
It has not always been easy for me to
work around executives, that's something
I've certainly had to work up to.
Learning how to build those relationships and interact
with people of different roles in the organization.
Just like technical skills, soft skills and
relationship-building skills develop over time.
Yeah, it's definitely not been an immediate
thing, it's just a matter of requirement.
You don't always have a choice on who you're helping,
right, and that's not our job, our job is not to pick and
choose what tickets we take on and our job is to help
what's urgent, what's important, and how do I help
that person, and how do I understand them and empathize
with them and not so much with "is that person difficult."
I know if a user's happy, if they've moved on topics.
If we're still talking about what's going on in their
world from a tech perspective, they're not over that issue.
If we're now talking about their son at baseball game or
what they're doing next weekend, then generally speaking
they're moved on to a conversational aspect,
so that's how I know if they're happy.
The best advice I could give to an admin supporting
remote users would be don't be afraid to pick up the phone,
don't be afraid to use unique tools to get the job done,
FaceTime, use your remote desktop tools,
use whatever's at your fingertips, be creative.