Cisco Webex Support (discontinued) vs. Remote Desktop Services

WebEx Support Center does what it is designed to do very well. If you need robust, efficient, and comprehensive remote support software, look no further. There are certainly other products that are simpler, and other products that are a bit "prettier" from a UI standpoint, but in terms of overall functionality, WebEx Support Center is hard to beat. If you're a company on a very tight budget, there are certainly cheaper options available, however.

Incentivized

Remote Desktop Services provides access to work environments from any device. This allows us to ensure business continuity in case of disaster. It provides admins more control over access and security. Remote Desktop Services simplifies software updates and compliance management by reducing the need to act on end users devices.

• Webex has helped us increase and streamline support to our customers.
• It allows us to enable forums or collaborative spaces to explain to clients and coworkers solution to certain problems

Incentivized

• Relative ease of setup: in comparison to some of the other solutions on the market (Citrix, etc.), Remote Desktop Services is rather easy to set up and get configured in your environment.
• Feature set: Microsoft offers a good deal of the same features many competitors offer in the same space including a mobile app and the ability to have a "native" app feel for a remote application.
• Inexpensive Licensing: in comparison to other solutions on the market Remote Desktop Services is inexpensive.
• Move LOB applications closer to their server counterparts: this goes for all remote solutions, but if you have a line of business application that makes a great deal of calls across the network to your data center, your remote office users will likely benefit from the performance and stability side by moving those client side applications into the data center.

Incentivized

• [In my experience], when there are issues, they sometimes ask for us to run tracelogs on the impacted participant's computer. Sometimes those participants use machines that are not managed by us and they are unwilling to get those logs. Ideally, [I feel] Webex can gather all the information from their side versus the participant side.
• While I do appreciate the constant follow up, sometimes it is overwhelming. I know they are trying to clear their queues, but it seems like they email once a day if they have not heard back from you [in my experience].
• Their support hours should coincide with my local hours of operation. Most of the support people I have worked with are located internationally and their hours of response are the opposite of my working hours.

Incentivized

• Advanced configuration is required.
• Off-site access from a different network is very insecure unless a VPN can be used.
• It's complicated and relatively costly for multi-user environments, as each user or device requires a CAL on top of the server licensing.
• Incredibly complicated licensing strategy from Microsoft.

Incentivized

Webex is well known by many other companies. It is easy to use and versatile. This familiarity builds a standard to conferencing and users are more comfortable using it. If you want to be safe with a choice of the many conferencing tools out there, Webex will be your best bet

Honestly, there are people available. But none of them will help you with your issues. They just keep assigning new service engineers who are often clueless.

Once set up it works well and is extremely easy for users. Getting it right can be difficult, it is easy to setup insecurely. Maintenance can be difficult with only a single broker and with manual switchover required for redundant gateways. Troubleshooting access issues can also be difficult

Incentivized

There are some third party tools available that allow you to manage multiple connections.

Incentivized

The support team is highly incompetent. The only thing that they are able to do flawlessly is register an issue and open the case. But this case related to the issue is never resolved. They will forward the case or assign a new service engineer. But the case will never be resolved. At least not soon. They take weeks to resolve issues.

As with any Microsoft Server product, support for Remote Desktop Services requires a paid support package. These are license-based and very costly, on top of the already costly product licensing. Microsoft's licensing is complicated to begin with, so setting up licensing alone essentially requires a licensing expert's counsel. There is community documentation and support available on Microsoft websites, as well as community websites.

Incentivized

Logmein GoToAssist

• Logmein-GoToAssist is the product we used previously and still to some degree use with WebEx Support Center. It was not always reliable and suffered with network congestion but worked quite well for us, we as a team feel that WebEx Support Center is a more reliable and a better overall product. This to me is due to the simplicity of the UI and ease of use as well as the quality of the network performance.

Kaseya with VNC Connect

• We use within Kaseya for our internally servers and local office users due to cost and efficiency, but it is more intended as console-level access and has a bit more features then WebEx Support Center, however is not good for remote support for our users who travel as it is slow.

Incentivized

We used RDS on-site primarily because of how easy it is for users to transition from their own desktop to a remote desktop. However, from off-site, there are VPN and other security considerations to take into account, and the process gets a little more complex. In this situation, especially if you're trying to support a user who is outside the local network, it can be easier to use something like Chrome Remote Desktop or TeamViewer. However, the Windows functionality of RDS is totally unmatched.

Incentivized

• Initially the ROI was very good. We tried to leave and use another platform (cost issues) and didn't have as much success so we came back to Cisco Webex Support.
• It allowed us to provide support to employees and clients as we needed to be able to provide it.

• Remote Desktop Services has had a major positive ROI impact at our firm. There were a number of times when our staff was traveling abroad to business meetings with a laptop that had missing presentations. But once they had internet access, a Remote Desktop Services connection is established, and presentation data can now be shown directly from their laptops as if theyr'e sitting in our office.
• Remote Desktop Services has made it possible for Mac staff users to use their computing devices to access our network system to run Windows applications and access all our network data.
• Remote Desktop Services has made it possible for our staff to successfully work remotely from outside the office. There were many occasions when emergencies came up which prevented staff from coming into the office to work. But as long as they have a computer with an internet connection, they used Remote Desktop Services to connect to our terminal server and successfully ran the programs to modify data files on the network without losing a beat.

Incentivized