Do you work in or support a "branch office" environment?

re: Do you work in or support a "branch office" environment?

rddash — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 17:58:04 GMT

It seems that that's all I do lately. The bane of my existence. Especially when "they" want to take what was once just a "remote" [their words] and turn into a "fully functional" branch office with the existing equipment/apps.
Any tips/tricks you would demonstrate would be welcome.

re: Do you work in or support a "branch office" environment?

dmarois — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 23:04:37 GMT

one free tool that made my life a LOT easier for supporting remote users/office is UltraVNC (http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net/)
combined with their SingleClick remote connect (http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net/addons/singleclick.html)

With that, I publish a SingleClick exe on my web server and whenever someone need support, I send them the url "http://www.mycompany.com/support.exe"
all they have to do is to execute and double click on my name in the list.

With that configuration there is no messing with firewall config at the client/remote office, if they use simple consumer firewall that does not block outgoing connections.
It also improve security as it is the remote user that initiate the connection, I can not connect to them by myself and they can kick me whenever they want.

The only firewall config is on my side where I need to forward a single port to my computer. which I can easily manage.

Since I started using that tool a few years ago, I no longer go through painful phone conversation asking them to describe what they are seeing on the screen (in their own terms... you know, the tv, the hard drive, the foot pedal...)

I know there are other tools, but this one is free, simple and "it just works"

I even created a sincleclick exe for home to support family and friends !
(and it works with dynamic dns !)

re: Do you work in or support a "branch office" environment?

Kenton Smith — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 02:00:18 GMT

Yes, I would definitely come to this. However, while the technologies in R2 are great and I would like to know how to implement them in this type of setup, I'd also like to hear a bit about dealing with very small (5 users or so) offices that don't have requirements for a server but need access to our head office resources.

Infrastructure Optimization Tour '06 Landing page is live!

Life of an IT Pro Advisor @ Microsoft Canada — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 06:40:13 GMT

In case you didn't catch my hints in this July blogpost, the first TechNet national tour is around Infrastructure...