SolarWinds Dameware Remote Everywhere
Bags of features make this a great web-hosted choice, although pricing isn’t a good fit for smaller businesses
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PRICE One technician, 500 endpoints, £355 exc VAT per year from solarwinds.com
Solarwinds’ Dameware Remote Everywhere lives up to its name, with a hosted design that allows technicians to reach out to users no matter where they are. Its pricing model is simple too: a £355 annual licence lets one technician support up to 500 endpoints, with additional licences enabling more concurrent sessions. That makes it great value for companies of a certain size, although those with smaller headcounts will very likely find other options more cost-effective.
Deployment starts at the web portal, where you create accounts for your technicians and set privileges for each one, determining which tools they’re allowed to use. Technicians can also be assigned to particular departments, which allows support requests to be automatically routed to the right person.
The web portal also hosts the client software for Windows, Mac and Linux endpoints, to which you can apply profiles to determine what features are available. A master password option lets you restrict access to the agent, and endpoints can be set to automatically lock when unattended sessions finish.
Technicians, meanwhile, get their own personal console app. From here, they can browse and connect to any endpoint that has the agent installed, and launch on-demand support sessions for systems that don’t have the software. Note that there’s no way for end users to initiate an on-demand session themselves: the technician has to make the first move.
After that it’s plain sailing. Once the correct six-digit PIN is provided, the on-demand applet fires up and opens the remote access session, automatically removing itself when either party disconnects.
In both on-demand and always-on sessions, technicians get access to the fully featured desktop console, with tools for file transfer and remote Registry editing and the option to switch between the desktop view and a command prompt. Support staff can also share their own screen with the user, start audio or video calls and tell the endpoint to reboot, restart or shut down. Sessions can be recorded too, with video uploaded to the web portal’s reports section.
While the Dameware control software is richly featured, there’s no browser-based alternative, as offered by most other products. However, technicians can use a mobile device
“In both on-demand and always-on sessions, technicians get access to Dameware’s fully featured desktop console”
to provide support when away from their desks, via the iOS app. We tried this on an iPad and had no problem logging into a technician account, browsing endpoints, connecting for remote control and creating ondemand sessions.
You can provide support to users on iOS devices via the Dameware Remote Support app – although, as expected, this provides only remote viewing, and doesn’t let support staff take control of the device.
Alongside all of this, Dameware lets technicians extract detailed system inventories from connected devices, including hardware configuration and serial numbers, network addresses, installed applications and Windows updates, both pending and installed. Reporting options are extensive too, with the portal showing session histories that can be filtered for details such as session IDs and user names. And if you want to check on technician performance, you can even send out surveys to ask end users about their experience.
Dameware Remote Everywhere’s pricing won’t work for every business. However, for larger organisations with a few hundred endpoints to look after it’s an excellent package, delivering an impressive range of secure support features that are easy to manage and use.
REQUIREMENTS Windows 7/Server 2012, macOS 10.7 Android 4 iOS 7 Linux