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Become a BomgarTM Jedi: Tips from the Master
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management & Moderator:
Good afternoon and welcome all of you to today's webinar from BomgarTM: How to Become a BomgarTM Jedi. We're going to learn some tips and tricks for how to use the Bomgar BoxTM to its fullest. First off, this is Nathan McNeill, V.P. of Product Management. We're also going to have Joel Bomgar on the call; Bomgar'sTM CEO. I wanted to get a couple of housekeeping things out of the way first. If you have any questions, ask them as you have them throughout the presentation. We will be taking questions at the end, but you want to go ahead and get those in because we're going to be filtering those as we go along. You should see a button at the bottom that lets you maximize the slide deck; make it a little bit bigger, make it easier to view. And also, if you have any technical problems, please enter those as questions as well and we will try to address those quickly.
So, to get started, I wanted to give you a little bit of information just about BomgarTM and how we got started. We were founded in 2003. We do remote control support solutions that allows a support agent to take control - excuse me - of virtually any system, located anywhere in the world, in just a few seconds. The support rep would direct the user to a website, and have them click on a link, and then give the rep control. We have over 2,000 customers in all 50 states and 30 countries. And, we are exclusively focused on the support professional on that particular market. And, to introduce Joel Bomgar, he is Bomgar'sTM CEO. He's certified from Microsoft, Cisco, Novell, HP, and Scubadiving and is a 3rd degree Bomgar BoxTM black belt. And also, for this presentation, Joel has agreed upon Marketing's request to do the entire presentation talking like Yoda.
Let's see, the game plan for today is Joel's going to go over how to get the appliance out of the box, where to put it, and why. Then a little bit of "wax on, waxoff" starting with the basics going through how to use basic Bomgar BoxTM features before we get into more detailed information, and then some BomgarTM secrets. Things that we didn't really mean to hide, but ended up a little bit lower down the list; some things for the administrator and some things for support rep. We think you're going to find these things to be very useful. And also, "I get up again": appliance disaster discovery. So, when the worst happens, how to recover from it quickly and get your business back online. So, with that, I'm going to introduce Joel Bomgar. Joel?
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
All right. Thank you Nathan. I do really appreciate it. Thank you, all of you, for attending. The goal is to make this as informative as we possibly can. We are going to try to cover a whole lot of ground in the presentation, so I'm more concerned with making you aware of all the tips, tricks, and secrets of what the Bomgar BoxTM can do more than the technical details of how it does them. So, if you have specific questions as far as what that looks like in the real world, please enter those in and we'll knock those out at the end. So, let's go ahead and jump straight into 'Out of the Box: Where to put the Bomgar BoxTM. Most of you have probably; those of you who are existing customers, already have that set up.
There's basically three places the Bomgar BoxTM can go. We'll go from top to bottom. The best place to put it as a physical device in your network is in a DMZ. The demilitarized zone is usually a secure location that is usually more secure than the internet, but obviously customer facing or internet facing, so less secure than your LAN. The Bomgar BoxTM would normally go alongside, in the same rack perhaps, as your email server, your web server, your spam filter, pretty much any device that faces the internet but does need to be in a secure location. If you don't have a DMZ, or if your network is essentially just segmented internal and external, it's normally best just to put the device outside your firewall. You want the Box to have a public IP address being an IP address that's routable from the internet, is available to the internet, and is visible by those on the internet so you can do remote control sessions to those people. What we don't recommend, which is certainly possible, is to put the Box inside your firewall and then do port forwarding to the Box. While that certainly would technically work, obviously the benefit is you want that outside your network or in a DMZ so that it is customer facing and all the best security is in place. Our goal is obviously to enable you to drop our Box in place with no changes whatsoever to your firewall.
Let's jump in. That graphic's probably too small to see the details, but kind of a high level of where the Box fits; it's normally a single Box at the support rep's office. Then, the individuals either at that office or support agents that are in the field, on the road, certainly can access that no matter where they are and they can run remote control sessions no matter where they are as well. Let's go ahead and jump straight in to real ... we're going to blaze through the quick high level of how our product works, just for a quick refresher, and we'll jump straight into the nitty gritty details of the fun stuff that can make you more productive and lets you get the most out of BomgarTM.
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
From a high level, functionally the support rep monitors the queue that's on the customer's side and this is - everything we'll be going through is in our latest version 9.1 of our product. If you don't have that we will provide a link throughout the presentation, or at the end of the presentation as well, where you can sign up for that and receive - excuse me - receive that update. All you have to do is have up to date maintenance with BomgarTM, and that's a free upgrade; get your Box up to date and you'll be set. So, support rep monitors the queue, sessions come in from the web that are initiated in one of a number of fashions. The support rep double clicks that session; they're immediately in session in remote control. The three different ways to initiate a session, real quick recap, someone can click on a support representative's name that is logged in and available to do support. If you want to hide those names because you don't want the names of your tech support reps visible on the web, you can hide those with a single click box - check box in the admin interface and use the session key box. The rep just reads the session key to the customer. Alternately, if your reps are not even on the phone with a customer, they can fill out a quick survey that says, "Here's my name. Here's my question," and that will get routed to the appropriate support rep. based on what their issue is, that will go to the team that's assigned to that issue.
When that happens, as soon as the support rep picks up the session, they can prompt the end user to request remote control of their screen to resolve an issue or assist them. The end user just has to click a link to allow that and you're immediately in session. The rep has full remote control of the end user's PC. It's obviously shared control. The end users always have overriding use of the mouse and keyboard control, but to the extent that the end user is not touching the keyboard or mouse, the control is in the support reps hands. So, let's jump straight into some of the fun stuff. As far as basic stuff, the stuff you can do when you're in a session, from a high level we'll cover a few things that most of you are aware of and then jump into some more details. But, one thing you can do is you can chat with other tech support representatives. If you're on the initial tab, the far left tab, you can chat with any other rep that is logged in to the Bomgar BoxTM. This is a great opportunity to ask questions like, "Hey, has anybody seen error, you know, 0X493?" Someone could easily come back on the tech support team that says, "Yeah. I actually spent five hours troubleshooting that yesterday and it's a simple patch. I found it on the web. It took me five hours but here, apply this." It saves everybody a lot of time because it's an interface where the tech support reps can collaborate and ask each other questions.
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
Within a specific session you can also do that as well so, for example, if you were in a session with two support reps supporting a single end user's PC, you can chat with the end user and you can chat with the reps specifically in there. And, which tab you're on, whether you're in a session or on the queues tab, will determine who you can chat with and what you can do.
We also - the "What's This" feature, the question mark, enables you to click that and then click anything in the rep interface and it will give you a description of what that feature and function does. Another feature you can do at the top right is the share and transfer a session. The Bomgar BoxTM has the ability, perhaps if your tech support team is split into Tier I, Tier II, Tier IIII support, first level support could share the screen of an end user with a second level tech support rep maybe to get their insight and say, "Hey, do you have some ideas on what I could possibly do?" Or, they could transfer the session altogether to escalate that through the process.
Last feature in this list of five I want to cover - or, let me cover auto-reconnect. BomgarTM does support the functionality that if you just click start, shut down, and reboot or remote machine it'll automatically reconnect at the end of the session. It does not require any user intervention on the remote side. The end user could be in a meeting, they could be at lunch, they could be doing anything that they need to be doing, and you can reboot their system. And, it will automatically give you remote control at the end of the session.
Last one I want to cover in a little bit more detail is the "run as admin" feature. Let me walk through because a lot of people don't understand how the "run as admin" feature works; and, it's a very powerful feature of Bomgar BoxTM and it's actually unique to our product. When BomgarTM initially runs on an end user's PC, they will be running in one of three sets of user rights. They're either user-level rights, power-user rights, or administrative rights. In a lot of ways, the user-level and the power-user are very functionally similar as far as what you can do. The administrative rights is really what gives you a lot more access to the core of the system. When a session starts with an end user's PC, the Bomgar BoxTM is going to dynamically detect which level of rights that user has.
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
If they have user-level rights, BomgarTM will run as an application on top of Windows on their PC. If they have administrative rights, it will run as a system service. The system service is something much more at the core of Windows. A system service runs in the background. If you do a reboot upon reconnect or if you do a reboot, a system service will still be running after the reboot or even if you log out of the system. If you click start/log out, system services continue to run, applications all shut down. So, the Bomgar BoxTM is going to dynamically detect whether the user is user or power user, in which case it will run as an application, or whether they have local administrative rights to their system in which case it will run as a system service which gives you the full reboot/reconnect/login/logout - all of that functionality.
Now, what the "run as admin" feature does, if they have administrative rights on their system, that feature will be left out because you are already are running as a system service and you have all the full capabilities of the Bomgar BoxTM. If they are running with user-level rights, or power-user rights, what that button does is you can click that button and it will immediately bring up a username and password dialog box on the remote user's system. All you have to do is enter administrative credentials on that system and administrative certainly does not have to be domain administrator credentials. It just merely needs to be something that has local admin rights on their system. Once you enter those credentials, BomgarTM will move from running as an application to running as a system service.
Once you do that you have all the full capabilities of a reboot/reconnect, a login/log out, you can do anything on their system; all of that. So, typical application if you're, you know, using a lock-down system, you run, it detects its user level rights, you click "run as admin", enter username and password. You're now running as a system service with BomgarTM and at that point you can click start/logoff, you can log back in as an administrator, you can do anything you need to do on their system. So, the "run as admin" feature, to summarize, is there to allow you to switch BomgarTM from application mode to system service mode which gives you a lot more capabilities as far as what you can do on their system because, again, it enables the reboot/reconnect, it enables the login/logout. Short of doing that, you will certainly have all the capabilities you would normally have in BomgarTM, they would just be with the local user account that is currently logged in to that system.
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
Anyway, so there's some detail around that. Some other things you can do ... let's talk about the back end. From the administrator's side the administrator has a lot of features and functionality that have been introduced in the most recent versions. One is Support Teams. What this enables you to do is you can take your support representative base, let's just use say a mid-sized company with maybe 20 tech support representatives. You can split those into functional teams and then each of those teams can be assigned specific areas that they're expected to do support for. So, maybe you have an operating system group and you have an office productivity apps group and, within the office productivity apps, they handle issues related to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access. And, the operating systems group handles issues related to Windows '95, '98, XP, whatever ... groups give you a lot of flexibility as far as how you can route remote control sessions.
The first capability as far as groups is when a user, if they are not on the phone with the tech support representative, they can go to the public site, support.companyname.com or whatever you've chosen to use, and they can say, "My issue is related to," and they can select Outlook. Their problem can be, you know, Outlook .EXE attachments are not displayed, perhaps something like that. As soon as they click submit that will go into the Outlook group. Now, you may find that a problem that a user thought was an issue with Outlook is actually related to an operating system issue. What teams lets you do is the Outlook team can take one look at that problem and say, "You know what? It's really an operating system issue." And, all they have to do is click transfer and transfer it to the operating system team that way one of maybe the five or ten individuals on the operating system team can take a look at that issue, pick it up, and go ahead and start troubleshooting.
So, teams provide a lot of flexibility as far as how sessions are routed when a user needs support, but they also allow a lot of flexibility as far as administration on the back end, and as far as reporting. The reporting engine on the Bomgar BoxTM allows you to run reports by team or by representative. So, it's a great way of breaking apart functionally who your tech support reps are and what they do.
Joel Bomgar - Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
Moving on, canned messages, this is pretty straightforward but if you find yourself explaining the same type of things to end users you can set up canned messages on the administrative interface of the Box. And then, those canned messages are available to all the tech support reps, and anytime they encounter a problem or a common URL that they need to push people to, they can set up canned messages and immediately drop that to the customer. Another great thing you can do with that is, if there's common problems that come up a lot and you have a large support rep team base, you can set up some pre-canned messages that both kind of explain the problem and the solution. So, it's certainly not a knowledge-based per se but it is a great way of securing that all your support reps are aware of some of the common issues and have a very easy means of, with one button, letting an end user know that, you know, the reason Outlook will not open .EXE attachments is for security. And, you can outline the reason why, and you can include a link to a Microsoft knowledge-based article perhaps. So, canned messages are a great way to be more productive.
Let's talk a little bit about the setting up user accounts. If you're starting remote support sessions by someone clicking the name of a tech support rep, you've probably been wondering, "What is the display name? Why is the display name there, but also, why is the display number there?" The display number is a number that is always associated in it's static it stays the same once it's been set with a specific user account. The purpose of that number is to give, when you're on the phone with a customer, to give the person on the other end of the session some other piece of information to associate with your name other than just your name. So, for me it's pretty easy because my name's Joel Bomgar and it doesn't get confused with pretty much anything else. If your name is John Smith and you also have a James Smith and a Joe Smith, it's a lot easier to tell someone, "Hey, go to support.companyname.com, and click on No. 7, Joe Smith." That's going to keep them from clicking on No. 12 which is James Smith or No. 5 which is, you know, which is some other user. So, the display number, whatever that is, it's great as a means of communicating not only a name but a number and it makes it easier. and also, because the representative list is sorted by the display number it's easy to tell them, especially say if you have 15 or 20 reps displayed, it makes it very easy for them to quick scroll down and say, "Oh, yeah. No. 15. Okay, Joe Smith. Yeah, you're right here." Okay, click that and you're set. So, that is what the display number is. That's why it exists and it's designed to make life a little easier especially if you have a lot of tech support reps logged in at one time and you're using the representative list to start sessions.
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
Let's keep going here and again, like Nathan said, if anybody who has questions please ask them real-time. We'll tabulate the questions throughout the webinar. My goal is to cover as much information as possible to at least open up the avenue to answer your questions so we're going to keep rolling pretty quick. Please ask questions and we'll really focus on the question and answer session at the end once we've had the time to tabulate what the questions are. So anyway, to keep going, a couple of other things that you can do on the administrator's side ... you can eliminate all the promptings when you ask for remote control.
Now, whether you want to do this really depends on what your company's policy is and what your privacy policies are and stuff like that. If your goal is to absolutely get in a remote control session as fast as conceivably possible, you can truly set it where they click the link on the web, they run the app, and you are in the remote control session. Simple as that you are straight in. no additional prompting, no asking for remote control, no, you know, asking for permission for remote control, all of that. It's a check box that's on the user account and you basically go in there and say you do not want to prompt for remote control which means that as soon as you start the session you'll be straight in remote control. You'll be set, no additional prompting.
So, again, you want to have kind of a comfortable level of prompting for the end user to feel comfortable that they're granting you permission on a step-by-step basis. But, at the end of the day, if you are ... the support you do is very transactional, as in the average call is five minutes, then shaving 30 to 45 seconds off the start of a session is absolutely golden and, you know, this check box can maybe knock another ten seconds off. So anyway, something to know if you're really focused on, you know, what is the best way to do it.
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
Let's move on here. Let's go to ... next feature. Let's talk about the push to start. This is something that's really unique to the Bomgar BoxTM. A lot of ... very few products actually on the market have a push functionality. What's unique about BomgarTM is that it has push functionality but it's also, obviously everything is centrally logged in the Bomgar BoxTM, so it is very secure. The ways the push to start session works is essentially a tech support representative can start a session either by directing some to remote.companyname.com or they can do a push to start. And, we'll talk more about what that looks like from the rep side of things.
They can do a push to start by clicking a button and it will ask them for a computer name or an IP address of a remote system. They can also browse to find that system as well. As soon as they click okay it's going to prompt them. As soon as it finds that system on the network, and it can be any system on the LAN, WAN, or on the other side of the VPN, it's going to do a scan and try to find that system. It will prompt for a user name and password with administrative credentials.
Now, to push any type of software to a remote system is going to require some type of administrative credentials so as soon as you enter a user name and password that has local admin rights to that system, again it doesn't necessarily have to be a domain admin account it just needs to be something that has rights to do that, it will immediately push BomgarTM to that remote computer and immediately kick off a remote control session.
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
What the back end, what you're looking at on the slide right now, is that you actually have the capability of pushing to even a completely unattended system. By default, in the settings of the Bomgar BoxTM, it's going to prompt you that if you do push the client to an unattended system it will prompt them for say ten seconds and asking or just basically letting them know someone ... a tech support representative has initiated a session to your computer. It will start the chat window on their screen and it will ask them if they want to allow remote control to start.
If, by default, if they do not answer at all it will deny remote control and just remain in a chat session. That's configurable from the administrative side. You can actually choose, especially if you're pushing to unattended servers, you can actually set it to allow if the answer, you know, if nothing is prompted. That way, if you're pushing the client to a server say sitting in a dark server room, it's gong to prompt for about five seconds and let them know, "Hey, someone's trying to connect," just in case somebody is sitting at the console. But, if nobody's sitting at the console it will go ahead and allow remote control.
So, the push to start function really allows you, and we'll talk a little bit more about it later, really allows you to push to any attended or unattended computer anywhere on your LAN or WAN. And then, of course, directing users to remote.companyname.com or whatever your DNS name enables you to start remote control sessions with any user anywhere in the world.
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
So, let's move on from there. Let's talk about ... one of the things that is new in our new version 9.1 is Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. We actually support LDAP. And LDAP is a means of authenticating a username and password against a third party database. In most people's cases they're using Windows servers with Active Directory; Active Directory being the domain that stores all the user accounts and passwords. What you can do with BomgarTM, if you don't already have this set up, is you can actually point the Bomgar BoxTM to the Active Directory domain controller and tell it that anytime a support rep is logging in, to authenticate their username and password against that database. The huge advantage with this is obviously you only have to maintain one set of usernames and passwords.
Now, this really isn't an issue if you have say five, six support reps. But, if you're dealing with maybe 200 tech support reps obviously it's a huge advantage to tie those usernames and passwords together and, unique to BomgarTM, this functionality is actually possible because the Bomgar BoxTM is residing at your location so it actually senses, physically on your location it has the capabilities to run authentication requests against Active Directory or whatever that may be. So, a lot of great things you can do with that if you want to use your existing usernames and passwords that everybody already uses for email, and logging onto the network, and everything like that. If they want to use those as their preferred method of username and password for logging into BomgarTM, you can set that up. It's called LDAP; again Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. It's just an interface that allows you to do that.
We also do allow you to set up group policies, so if you have perhaps maybe an Active Directory you have a group set up that, everybody who's allowed to use BomgarTM is in that group, if you have 200 people in that group you can also apply policies to those users. There's an interface on BomgarTM to do that as well so it's a great way of assigning the same user-level rights to a whole lot of users at one time because, obviously, you don't want to granularly do that on a user-by-user basis. So, some great stuff you can do as far as tying BomgarTM in with LDAP as well as setting up policies.
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
Let's move on. A few other administrator secrets, there's a lot of reporting built in to the Bomgar BoxTM on the administrative side. The administrative login built into the Box, you can run reports, you can run session reports, which tell you every single session that ran through the Box which is every session that anyone ever ran period, including sessions that were started with a push to start or anything. They all run through the Box for security, and logging, and full video session recording, and everything like that.
The session report shows you every session and absolutely every aspect of everything that happened in that session so it's great if you want to use that for billing purposes, to go back and find out how long that session lasted, or for auditing purposes. You also have an exit survey, which you can set up and review the results of that, so you can allow your customers to rate their experience with each tech support rep and then you can run a report and it will tell you, you know, each individual tech support rep - their average rating is four stars, five and a half stars, you know, three stars. Whatever it is. And, it's a great way for you to determine how effective your tech support reps are.
So, anyway, a lot of stuff on the logging and reporting database you can do. Also, new in version 9.1 is full, like I said, video and session recordings. so, you have the capability of going back and actually clicking on a link and it will convert the entire remote control session into a flash format file, and you can actually watch that live on the web interface of the Box or you can even download that flash file, perhaps you may want to edit that, in Macromedia Flash and you can post that for training. Macromedia Flash, if you pull that in you can even add audio and stuff like that so you can use that remote control session for training, put it on your training website, and maybe let everyone know that, "Hey, if you want Outlook to allow .EXE attachments," you know, which is probably a bad idea anyway. But, if you wanted to allow that, here's a video-recorded session of all the steps you go through to do that. Please watch it," and you can actually, with any flash editing program, you can put a voice over on top of that and do some great stuff with training.
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
So, great video capture mechanism. It converts to flash, it's crystal clear, it's beautiful. So, anyways, lots of fun from the logging and reporting perspective. A couple of other things you can do; you can customize the banner that displays on the chat window when a customer is running a session. So, by default I believe it's a 480x40 pixel, something like that, banner at the top that we're streaming there by default. You can customize that look and feel to your own company.
Keep running through these pretty quick. You can also, if you choose to do this, this is not on by default but the administrative interface allows you to, if you choose, to allow your end users to download a chat or even a video session of everything that happened during that session. So, if you have any of your end users that are a little reluctant to do a remote control session, you can assure them that, look, at the end of the remote control session, you'll have the capability of downloading this little file which will play back a full video recorded session of everything that happened during the session and you can download a chat ... of the entire chat that took place between me and you, and it really gives them a lot of confidence that they know they basically have a full recording of everything that happened. Now, you may not want to make that available to your end users, you know, it again depends on your own company's policies but all of those options are available to you.
A few other things you can do, all of the help text that displays on the public site is editable. We won't talk about that a whole lot, but you can choose whether the rep list displays, whether the list of starting a session from the web with a support issue displays, whether the session key box displays, and you can edit all the text around those so you can match the look and feel of your company as well.
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
Keep rolling through this. We already talked a little bit about exit surveys; version 9.1 of our product includes very robust exit surveys. By default it's very simple. I believe it asks you, you know, please rate your experience with this tech support rep 1-5 and then you can leave comments about your experience and that's all, of course, available via the admin interface on the back end. But, in the new version 9.1, we have very robust back end survey data so you can set up yes/no questions, you can set up checkboxes, you can set up radio buttons. You can, essentially, ask any type of questions. You can build a survey. It's all web based, it's all drop-downs, it's all very easy.
You can build a survey that says, hey, I want to ask them, you know, was your problem resolved? Yes or no? Rate your experience 1-5 with this tech support rep. You know, which of the following services would you be interested in that we provide as a company? If they check, hey, give me a call about, you know, voice-over IP phone service perhaps, you know, you could turn those over to your sales team and they could chase those leads.
So, it's an opportunity for you to build a survey that says whatever you want including, you know, hey would you like someone to follow up with you about how we can better serve you in these areas? If they check those two checkboxes, the logging and reporting would show those up and you can immediately contact that customer.
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
So, a lot of granularity built into the exit survey as far as just a very powerful tool for you to know how your end-users feel about your tech support reps as well as how they feel about what they want as far as next steps in your company; a very powerful tool. End users will enter a lot of information in a follow-up form that comes up at the end of a remote control session.
They'll enter way more information than they'll actually tell a tech support representative on the phone. If they're not pleased with their experience and the tech support rep says, "Hey, is there anything we can do to serve you better?" They'll probably say, "No, I'm fine." If you give them the option of entering comments and feedback, they may say, "You know what? I really wish I could be better served in this way or that." So, great way of determining how you can support your end users better.
You can also, more administrator secrets, you can require the representatives to state whether the issue was resolved or not at the end of the session which, essentially, when the session ends and the representative client, if the rep tries to close that client it will prompt them and say this session cannot close until you specify whether this issue is resolved or not. It's a great way for you to determine, for instance, you can go in and look - did every session that the tech support rep say was closed, did the customer say it was closed? Obviously if there's a disparity, if you're finding out that your tech support reps think issues are resolved a lot more than the customer thinks they're resolved, it's something that you can address as appropriate. So, it's a great way for you , on the tech support rep side, to track whether stuff was resolved or not.
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
Obviously, our product has supported for a long time the ability to fully brand the public site, which is the customer facing, or employee facing, or client-facing site where tech support issues are initiated. You can edit; it's all very straightforward HTML. You can edit that with your own look and feel. You can even embed parts of that session initiation page into your own website so you don't even, necessarily, need to direct them to the Box. You can actually just display that on there.
So, all right. Let me talk ... keep going here. File store: one of the exciting things you can do is, our Box has a place where you can upload frequently used files, so if you find a typical application you may find that, out of 20 tech support reps, they're constantly sending customers different versions of patches, different versions of this, maybe they're using different VPN clients. The file store on the Box is the perfect place to include a list of the files that are frequently going to be used. And, you can let your tech support reps know that, look, anytime you need a VPN client please get that client from remote.customer, you know, .companyname.com/files. It's basically a real simple, straightforward STP where you can upload frequently used files. They're all on the Box. Anybody who needs those files, from a tech support rep perspective, they're all using the same versions. You don't have issues with each tech support rep in having their own set of files that they use frequently, or utilities, or whatever. You can keep the latest versions in one centralized location.
I'll cover some of the rest of this pretty quick, but there's a version 9.1 of our product includes an application programming interface that actually enables you to start sessions from a means other than ... maybe you have a ticket tracking system and you want to start sessions from that, or maybe you want to pull data from the Bomgar BoxTM and tie it in with your own ticket tracking system. So, we have an API to do that. It's very straightforward. You can pull that data or you can start sessions with Bomgar BoxTM that way.
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
Let me skip over to site aliases real quick. A couple other tips you can do, if you find that you're going to be in a tech support session for a long period of time, the speed of a BomgarTM session is dictated by how much information is going between the two systems and the bandwidth of the connection. Normally, you can't control the bandwidth but you can control how much information goes back and forth. If you drop the screen resolutions, especially with some of today's laptops that are running 1600 or 1900x1200 something like that, if you drop that down to maybe 1024x768, or 800x600, you're transferring a whole lot less screen information and it significantly speeds up your session.
So, probably not worth doing if you're only going to be on the phone, five, ten, fifteen minutes. But, if you anticipate your going to be on the phone with a customer for issues that linger throughout the day, it's something that you can drop the resolution down and it will speed things up a lot. So, a few other things you can do on the support rep side, in the settings dialog box, in the tech support rep client, there's three checkboxes at the bottom that I'll cover real quick.
One checkbox automatically requests screen sharing. You can check that if, anytime you take a session out of the queues, if you want to immediately to ask the end user to start a remote control session, you can enable that and prompt for that. You can also, bottom left option, you can automatically attach that session so that every session in your window is a separate window and then the right check boxes, you can actually prompt anytime someone enters the queue, you can immediately prompt it yes/no, do you want to start a session with this user? So, some things you can do there.
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
We already talked about earlier about the Push to Start session option. Again, quick recap, you click actions on the support rep client side, you click actions, push to start a session. It'll ask you number - step No. 2 there, it'll ask you for a computer IP address. You can - excuse me - enter that third or you can browse through a list of all your computers you can find on your network. It'll then prompt you with the username and password dialog box. You click next and you're connected to that system. It's about, you know, the whole process takes less than 30 seconds if you know what system you want to connect to and it's on your LAN or WAN. Again, if it's over the internet you just direct them to remote.companyname.com, whatever DNS name you've chosen to use for that.
Keep jumping here through things. You can push URLs through the remote system. It's a great way of actually triggering the remote user's browser. The end user's browser will actually open to the web page you specify. You can do that if you're in just chat mode or if you're in full-screen mode with a - excuse me - even if you're in a remote control session you have the capability of doing that.
Another thing you can do; I'll cover this real quick. A tech support rep can enter notes about a session on the summary tab in a remote control session. So, they're in a session, they're, you know - and, if you want - the tech support rep wants to include notes like, "Hey, I was on the phone with this customer. They think the problem's our problem but it's really not. Here's the reason. Here's the link to the knowledge-based article." If they want to include information that the person viewing the reports will be able to see, they can do that on the notes section of the summary page in the tech support rep/client.
Joel Bomgar - Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
If they transfer that session to another tech support rep, by default, that rep will be able to enter their own notes in a session. But, they also click a button that says, "Pull Notes" which will actually pull the notes from the tech support rep that was already working on that system into their notes field. It's a great way if they want to get caught up on where the previous tech support rep got with that customer before the session got transferred. Some possibilities there.
Last, let's go ahead before we do a quick recap and cover disaster recovery. The goal is obviously be back online as soon as conceivably possible. If disaster recovery is critical, most of our customers that are in that position purchase two Bomgar Boxes. If you have two Bomgar Boxes, obviously for production you only need one of them, but if you have two for one as a backup the basic mechanism that you're going to use for disaster recovery is you keep - first of all, you keep an up to date backup of the Box's configuration. You want to make sure that that's up to date. That'll back up your username and password database, you know, the basics of your session log, you know, some files - store files and a lot of other - all the settings information for that Box. That's critical because, if you do bring another Box online, you'll need to restore that configuration data in order to insure that that Box is exactly the way it was before.
Essentially the recovery steps, if you have one Box running and it's configured in production and you have a second Box and it's configured identically to the live Box it's just offline, if those two systems - if the live Box goes down for any reason or the data center it's in goes down or something like that - if those two systems are on the same TCP/IP subnet, you can change the IP address for the backup Box to the same IP address as the production Box once you take the production Box offline. And then, all you have to do is restore the configuration file from the live Box to the backup Box and you're completely online.
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
The process is essentially the same if your two appliances are on different subnets which, often maybe we'll have this with some of our customers in New York, they'll have a data center that's actually in Manhattan but they'll also have one somewhere else in New York just to ensure for disaster recovery that they'll have two locations. If that's the case, basically, again you can configure both appliances with different IP addresses and all you have to do is change the DNS name where that DNS name points. Point it from the live Box to the backup Box. That only takes about a number of minutes for the DNS to update. It's not the 78 to 72 hours that updating a route domain of DNS takes, it's merely just a quick DNS update. Again, it'll go through your DNS servers in a matter of minutes and you'll be set.
Very detailed information about that is available at www.bomgar.com. That link there at the bottom - and it's got maybe a three or four page detailed description of disaster recovery with the Box. What's the most effective way and all of that. Let's keep going.
This is basically - let me do a quick recap. If I could pick out of all the information I've covered, the seven most underutilized features and options that I wish everyone was fully aware of, this is what I would pick. Start from the top: using the file store. The file store on the Box is a great place to store files. You know, you can store large files there, you can store, you know, pretty much anything that needs to be commonly accessed and it's available with a simple click of a button. So, use the file store. Second, reboot/reconnect. Just remember you can do that. The "run as admin" feature; if you need to escalate your rights from user-level to administrative rights. eliminating all prompting - you know, make sure that you have the right amount of prompting for the end-user to ensure that they feel comfortable with the process that you're using to start a remote control session but you certainly don't want to put more prompting than is required that they feel comfortable with. Ideally, you want to get in that remote control session as fast as conceivably possible.
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
The push to start session feature - any system that's on your LAN or WAN is, obviously you can start a push to start session - you can start a session that way probably a lot faster than you can even get them to a simple web address and get them to click a link. So, great feature there and it supports unattended systems. So, if you're still using some other products to support your servers, perhaps it's a lot more advantageous to use BomgarTM. That way, all your data's recorded, you have video logs of everything that happened, and it's a lot better, from especially a Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA perspective, than perhaps using a LAN-based remote control product to access servers which does not have any logs whatsoever to who changed what or who logged in, or what they did.
Exit surveys - definitely want to get those set up and review them often. You can find some great information. And lastly, if you have a DNS name, some companies we've found, especially in the government sectors or Fortune 500, sometimes the Bomgar BoxTM is put at a web site that's something like support.jackson.missippi.state.us.northamerica.com on .companyname.com.
If you have a DNS name that's that long and you're reading that to end users over the phone to start sessions, we would highly encourage you to, whoever administers your DNS or whatever, get them to assign a name like support.companyname.com or remote.companyname.com or whatever it is. Make it something easy. You may even have the flexibility of going and registering a real easy domain name on register.com, or GoDaddy, or Yahoo, or One and One, or something like that and picking a name like support - acmesupport.com if your company's name is Acme or something like that. So, quick recap there.
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
And a few last things before we jump straight into questions. Let us know if you have any questions or problems. We try to stay very open to our customer base and we do truly believe in developing what our customers want most. And, the best way we can do that is if you let us know what you want, what you'd like to see in our product, in the road map, and other things. Keep open lines of communication and keep us updated on how your situation in the field is needed. And, that's one of the reasons we added Macintosh support for Mac OS 10. We added that in our version 9.1, so our customers have been enjoying that for a little while now and it's really just a matter of we can include in our products what's necessary if we know from our customers what they want.
Give us suggestions on how to improve our support materials. We want to have great documentation out there about what our product does but also how to use it in the most advantageous manner to your organization. So, if there's whitepapers that would be beneficial to you please let us know. Give us feedback on how to improve our product. The best was is probably contact our sales department. They can pass that along to the right - whoever you've been working with, they can pass that along to the right person. We can get you an answer on where we're going with a specific feature or something like that or if there's things you'd like to see in our product.
Also, send us stories. If you've got - if you've found unique ways to use the Bomgar BoxTM or if you've got a great application that could become more effective if we went a certain way with our product, you know, we have the flexibility that we want to be able to build our product in a way that best serves you. So, I believe that is the last slide.
Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
Let's go ahead and, during the session Nathan's been gathering questions, and we'll go ahead and try to knock out as many as we can. So, with that, Nathan, what have we got for questions?
Nathan McNeill:
Q: All right. Thanks Joel. Let's see. I want to - there is one comment from someone who's said that he's not seen these interfaces before. He's wondering if this is a newer version or perhaps an enterprise package.
Joel Bomgar:
A: Sure. Actually we were going to have, and I'm not sure, do we have the link to what - we should have the link to the queue where our customers can sign up for the update to version 9.1. I'm not sure if that link is in here. We'll get that link in a second here. Give us a second and we'll give you the link that, again, if you're up to date on maintenance, the new version 9.1 is available to you for free. All you have to do is get in the queue to be built that upgrade and we can get that to you. So, we'll get that link to you in a minute here. They can do that in the background. Nathan, we'll go ahead and jump to the next question.
Nathan McNeill:
Q: Okay. Here's one from Steve. He says, "Can LDAP be used if the Box is behind the DMZ or if it is hosted by a third party?
Joel Bomgar:
A: Good question. Yes, it can but the LDAP can be set up in two different ways. One, you can have the Bomgar BoxTM directly query the LDAP server. So, that would be if it's physically inside your network or if it's in a DMZ and it has access to the domain controller. If it does not, what we have is called an LDAP agent. Essentially what you do is you install the agent on a machine that has, you know, is in the same physical network as your domain controller. I believe you can actually install it on the domain controller. What that agent does is it essentially serves as a go-between between your Bomgar BoxTM and your domain controller. So, let's assume that your Bomgar BoxTM is hosted in a third party data center somewhere.
What you can do is you can install the LDAP agent behind your firewall in a secure location on a system that's on the same network as your domain controller. What that agent will then do is it will form a connection with your domain controller, but it will also form an outbound connection through your firewall, so you don't have to alter your firewall, and it will form a connection with your LDAP - excuse me - or with your Bomgar BoxTM. That way, every time a request comes in to a Bomgar BoxTM it will immediately ask the agent, which it has a persistent connection with, "Hey, can you go ahead and query the LDAP server for me real quick? Find out about this username and password and let me know if this user is allowed to access the system."
So, yes you can. You would not - again, the recap is you would not configure the Bomgar BoxTM to query your active directory domain controller directly because obviously you don't want to configure your firewall to allow any type of traffic like that. All you would need to do is install the BomgarTM LDAP agent on a system inside your network and then it would handle the secure connection to the Bomgar BoxTM that was out there on the internet. It would also handle the secure connection to your domain connection and you would to be opening any security avenues or needing to touch your firewall in any way for that.
Nathan McNeill:
Q: Okay. And, this question's from Jonathan. He says, "Do you need file and print sharing turned on in order to use Push and Start?"
Joel Bomgar:
A: You do actually. And, a lot of people normally - any product that uses Push to Start is going to use RPC Port 135 I believe. And, that includes - I mean, that's not unique to BomgarTM. That includes any enterprise application that uses any type of push functionality. That goes down all the way to, you know, Symantec, Norton Antivirus. If you're rolling out the corporate version of Symantec Antivirus 10 and you're dong a push to all of your systems it's going to use the same push mechanism. No, normally that's not a problem, especially on a domain
Normally, even if you have Windows software firewalls installed on your systems, normally, within the domain systems that are trusted and are part of the domain are going to allow computers that are within the domain to connect to each other with the file and print sharing mechanism. So, we really have not - you know, a lot of people do ask us, "Well what about software firewalls, is that going to prevent it?" and stuff like that.
Our experience has been really there has not really been an issue because most of the time systems that are part of a domain are allowed to communicate with other systems that are part of that domain. And, even if file and print sharing is turned off to the outside world, it will allow that within a domain environment. So, yes. Short answer is file and print sharing does have to be available but the good point to that is normally that's not an issue. Especially if you're on the same domain as the end user system because most even software firewalls like Windows firewall will allow you to do that as long as you're on the same domain.
Nathan McNeill:
Q: Okay. We're going to do a couple more questions. I know we're going a little bit long. This is a question from Jason, "If we have a user initiate via the issue submission or the support request form but none of the reps are logged in, how does the Bomgar BoxTM handle that?"
Joel Bomgar:
A: Actually, I believe the Bomgar BoxTM would - and Nathan actually you may be able to take that as well. But, I believe that it will just prompt them. It will let them know, you know, "we apologize but no support representatives are currently logged into the queue, we apologize." And, that's actually a configurable message I believe. I believe what prompts is a part of what's called an orphaned session which is essentially if a session starts but there's nobody on the other end you can choose the text that it will prompt that end user with. And, I think by default that text says, "We apologize, no support representatives are currently logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience." And then, you could say, "Please call this number." Nathan, I think, I believe I'm correct on that. You can help clarify on that.
Nathan McNeill:
Yeah, that's correct and actually that text is also customizable. So, if you'd like to enter specialized text that gives your own message when the session is orphaned, you can do that as well. And, one thing I also wanted to mention is that we're going to push URL that gives you the link to the upgrade page. So, that will be available in just a second.
Joel Bomgar:
Excellent. So, if any of you do not have the new version BomgarTM 9.1, definitely get in the queue for that. It's a major step forward for BomgarTM. It's obviously the best product we've ever released on the market so there it is. I believe it's www.bomgar.com/upgrade. You should be able to push that - it should open your browser to that link. So,, please sign up, get in the queue, and get BomgarTM 9.1. it's absolutely the best product we've ever released. Next question Nathan. Do we want to knock out a couple more?
Nathan McNeill:
Q: Yeah, one more. This is my favorite, "What does it take to be a third degree Bomgar BoxTM black belt?" It's kind of like the Sixth Sigma program isn't it?
Joel Bomgar:
A: I guess it takes, you know, what the credentials are over 1,000 hours of use of the Bomgar BoxTM -
Nathan McNeill:
Right. At least three years of experience and you have to be CEO of BomgarTM.
Joel Bomgar:
That's right. Being founder and CEO of BomgarTM certainly helps and -
Nathan McNeill:
It's required. So, all right. I think we're going to wrap it up. Thank you all for attending and have a great day.
Joel Bomgar:
Yes, thank you so much. And again, please - anything we can do for you, please let us make our software better for you. So, have a wonderful day and thank you so much for attending.