I started testing out ConfigMgr 2007’s remote control capabilities today on a new Windows 2008 server environment I’m working on. As a background there are three different sets of remote control tools available: Remote Tools, Remote Desktop, Remote Assistance
Here’s a quick summary of what I ran across when testing these in a ConfigMgr 2007 environment on Windows 2008 server:
Remote Tools: Worked on x86 and x64 platforms (except for Windows XP x64 which is discussed here: https://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PageIndex=1&SiteID=17&PageID=1&PostID=3812641)
Remote Desktop: Works on both x86 and x64 platforms, but as it takes control over the remote system (and doesn’t share it with the user) it’s not very useful for remote control of user systems (at least if you are trying to debug what the end user is running into).
Remote Assistance: Works if the remote assistance invitation is saved to a file, but did not work when connecting via computer name or IP address. Some steps were required to get it to work (shown below). It worked on both x86 and x64 platforms it was connecting to. For Remote Assistance, there were a few steps that had to be done to get it to work on Windows Server 2008:
When I right-clicked on a system and choose the Remote Assistance option I got a message “Unable to locate Remote Assistance files.” My first thought was “Well that’s a feature.” And ironically it was a feature – that needed to be added.
Added the Remote Assistance feature.
I am currently still unable to connect via Remote Assistance via IP address or computer name, but it works like a champ if I have the user save off their remote assistance request and we add that request in to ConfigMgr’s Remote Assistance request.
