We are a small to midsize company with about 40 users and 4 windows 2003 servers.. we have OCS 2007 installed with live meeting, but have no official "edge server" or dmz topology.. we sit behind a single firewall with a single public ip address.. We do have the ability to add a public ip to a secondary nic on a machine and/or use virtualization inside another machine if need be.. What i'm trying to determine is what the cheapest remote assistance type feature would be for our remote customers for support of our Products. We have an MSDN and action pack subscription, with access to the latest software.. I had looked, briefly, at the idea of using a 3rd party source like logmein.com, where you could have domain.logmein.com, at least i think this was the company.. but that was a bit expensive, something in the neighborhood of say $150 per month, whereas the actual number of remote support cases might be a handful per month. Is there a package that we have or could have for little expense that would do the trick? IE: Live meeting with OCS? Problem is, we dont have an edge server and i've already tried opening the port for live meeting but this failed, also live meeting couldnt be initiated by the other side, we would have to send them a live meeting conference request via email. Is there an "easy assist" version out there for companies.. this would be ideal.. where we email them the session id and they simply join via the web site? IE: Say Crossloop perhaps, though we'd ideally like something that would allow us to have a domain name like assist.domain.com for the remote user to log into and install the remote software and join. Any thoughts out there.. Thanks in advance

OCS Live meeting is a conferencing solution. You should look to something similar like VNC http://www.realvnc.com/index.html Deli

Check out Bomgar's applicances.They're a hardware box that will allow you to leap through remote firewalls for remote support. It's very similar to Microsoft's Easy Assist.We got one of these when we received support at a client site from another company for software they supplied. It works flawlessly, and it's super simple for both the technicial and the supported user. Their website is here: http://www.bomgar.com/There is also the SonicWALL SSL-VPN solutions. They're more focused on remote users connecting into your office, but the larger models (the 2000 and 4000, not the 200) have the ability to add a Virtual Assist license to them that works quite similar to Easy Assist, only it handles everything through the web-browser via Java (no downloaded executable to run, like Easy Assist and Bomgar). If you need support for remote workers AND the ability to support them, then the SonicWALL is a good choice.Neither solution is cheap. They're both hardware units, and they're both upwards of $1000.00, but they work very well.

Yes there are cheap and free alternatives which are almost equivalent of easy assist. For example you can use this website. All you have to do is run this program on your machine(Not necessarily toinstall it.) www.teamviewer.com

Checkout Microsoft Shared View. I have found a invaluable free tool for remote repairs and commerce. All you need is a live account and is a small download. It mainly will only allow a shared screen but i enough to diagnose the problem usally. https://connect.microsoft.com/content/content.aspx?ContentID=6415&SiteID=94&wa=wsignin1.0 Regards Craig Mitchell

Remote Desktop manager. work as a bomb (free) search via google configure and work

Hi SystemsRep, The stand out option would be www.teamviewer.com as initially suggested by Ronn1e. You can buy a single life time license which would meet your needs well and cost would be low in the long term. There is a very good free version however it is not for commercial use. You are not required to open ports or have any dedicated means of remote access setup to your clients. All the best.