Netop Remote Control 12.72
An affordable hybrid solution offering handy in-browser support and great access controls for your team
SCORE
PRICE Perpetual: 1 guest/10 hosts, £625 (exc VAT); Subscription: 100 Hosts, £1,075 per year (exc VAT) from netop.com
Netop’s remote support product is a hybrid service that gives you the best of both worlds. Its web portal helps you reach remote clients and provide support from anywhere on the internet, while on-premises users get the benefit of additional management services and features such as a system inventory.
To get started, you simply need to install the host component on each workstation. Enrolment packages can be downloaded directly from the web portal, and to streamline the process they can be preconfigured with unique signatures and set up to link the host directly to your account. For extra security, you can also apply a hard-coded time-limit on how long the agent will work for, and how many times it can be used. Once you’ve enrolled your clients, you can also use custom packages to place them into support groups.
We installed the default package on a selection of Windows 10 hosts, all of which showed up in the web portal account as soon as the install had finished. Next to each one, a quick- access menu showed options for remote control, file transfer, remote management, chat and a browser-based support console.
Installing the host on our MacBook clients was a bit more time-consuming; the package comes down as a DMG disk image, which must be mounted prior to installation, and you have to manually enter your portal account details – this isn’t complicated, just tedious.
Still, Netop Remote Control has some real plus points. As well as managing clients, you can manage the staff within your own support team, specifying what different technicians can do on a host: team members can receive full remote control or viewonly access, and you can determine whether a support agent is allowed to use file transfer and chat.
A remote session can be launched by simply clicking next to a device in the web portal. This opens up a remote desktop session directly in your browser, offering simple remote control plus options to lock, restart or shut down the host.
There are buttons for launching file transfer, remote management and chat. These don’t run in the browser, however, but rather launch the
“As well as managing clients, you can manage your own support team, specifying what different technicians can do”
standalone Netop Guest app and trigger the requested function. If it’s not already installed, this lightweight tool can be downloaded from the portal in a matter of minutes, and can be used independently of the online portal. We suggest you use the Guest app where possible, as not only does it offer many more functions than the web-based interface, it also has a much slicker remote control interface, with handy shortcuts for remotely running programs and accessing the host’s Windows Management console.
If you’re providing on-premises support, you can also use the Guest app to browse the network and see a list of supported hosts that are available to connect to over TCP/IP. Moreover, for convenience, you can set up a “phonebook” of shortcuts to selected hosts, which stores authentication, encryption and compression details.
As a final nice touch, the Guest console is also able to generate a hardware and software inventory of each remote system, and we found this to be impressively accurate. It correctly identified the CPUs, memory and hard disks in our diverse range of clients, got all the host OS versions right and provided a complete list of software applications.
Mac deployment could be smoother, but once it’s up and running, Netop Remote Control delivers a versatile mix of cloud and on-premises remote support services. Its access controls are ideal for offices that rely on agency staff, and there’s the option to buy either a perpetual licence or an annual subscription to suit your finances.
REQUIREMENTS Windows 7/Server 2008 upwards macOS 10.7 upwards Linux Mobile apps: Android 4 upwards