NetOp Remote Control 12.65
NetOp delivers joined-up hosted and on-premises remote support, offering great security and value
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE from netop.com
1 guest/10 hosts, £625 exc VAT
Now in its fourth decade, NetOp Remote Control has always boasted a sharp focus on access security. This latest version features optional multi-factor authentication, which requires technicians to enter their username and password plus a security code to access its web portal.
That’s not to say that NetOp is cumbersome, though. Indeed, getting set up could hardly be simpler. as the Windows installer generates custom enrolment packages with unique signatures. This means there’s no need to set up passwords individually; the deployment package links each desktop to the web portal account.
We were impressed by how well this works. After creating our enrolment package, we downloaded it to our Windows 10 desktops, after which it took less than a minute to install on each one. No further user intervention was required: once the installation process had completed, the hosts automatically popped up in our web portal ready for action.
Sadly, things are a bit less breezy for Mac users, who have to download and run a standalone installer from the NetOp support site. We also had to manually configure our NetOp account details before our macOS systems appeared in the portal.
Once your hosts are all registered, you can organise them into groups, if required, and create bespoke support profiles (which may optionally have limited lifespans and connection counts). The portal is also where you create user accounts for technicians and decide what functions they can access. This is another area where NetOp scores highly for security: it’s easy to determine which technicians have full access to host systems, who gets view-only access, and set all sorts of granular options in between.
The portal also lets you open a browser-based HTTPS connection to any host via a single click. This provides basic remote-viewing and remote-control facilities, plus options to lock, restart or shut down the host – which might well be all you need. For greater control, you can install the more advanced NetOp Guest console, recently updated to support Windows Server 2016. We found this hooked up seamlessly to our NetOp Portal
“The installer generates enrolment packages with unique signatures, so there’s no need to set up passwords individually”
account and all registered hosts were immediately displayed in its Quick Connect window.
From here, host connection is a simple double-click manoeuvre; the remote-control window offers a toolbar ribbon for quick access to all functions along with facilities to use the clipboard and reboot the host system. From the guest console, you can also use the host’s dropdown menu for direct access to tools such as remote control, file transfer and chat.
It’s supported by a remote-management tool, which presents handy views of the host’s hard disks and provides access to the Windows Event Viewer and Task Manager. You can inspect running services, and stop or restart them, and even log the user out, restart the host – or turn it off.
There are two other tools that we found particularly useful too. Demonstrate mode allowed us to display the guest’s screen on the host, so we could show users how to complete a particular task. Host sessions can also be recorded by the guest console and saved for posterity.
Finally, the guest console also includes a useful remote-inventory feature. Selected from the host’s dropdown menu, this reads in plenty of useful details about hardware and software and stores them on the guest for later reference.
The neat combination of onpremises console and cloud portal makes NetOp Remote Control a great hybrid support solution. It offers a wealth of powerful support tools at a good price, with impressively tight and configurable access controls.