Desktop Support On An Organizational Level

~~Desktop support is a term that IT professionals use to describe the duties of keeping a desktop computer in tip-top working order. This can be achieved through in-person interactions with computer users, over the phone helpdesks, and remote control from a local computer. In the last ten years more and more of this desktop support work has been done through management software and services known as Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM). Tra Consulting has been encouraging the businesses it supports to upgrade to our current RMM solution in order to allow us to increase our support to users; streamline updates, upgrades, security systems, and malware and virus removal; and it allows us to be more proactive in preventing problems before they happen, which in turn, increases worker productivity.
 
RMM allows IT professionals like me at TRA Consulting to increase desktop support to businesses by allowing remote access to the computers on-site at the business. For example, RMM can decrease the wait-time between when a computer issue is reported and when it is resolved.  In the old days, when an employee at one of the businesses TRA Consulting supports reported a problem and a technician was not already on-site, there would be a longer lag-time between receiving the report, wrapping up at another location, then driving to the location where the issue was reported and that can mean valuable productive time was wasted while the employee waits for their computer to be fixed. Now with RMM, there is a shorter wait-time. I can log-in to the reported computer, and address the issue from a remote location. Getting an employee’s computer up and running more quickly using remote management software can increase productivity.
 
With the use of RMM, I can streamline many of the processes that would otherwise be very time consuming to complete one computer at a time.  For example, one of the companies supported by TRA Consulting was looking to upgrade their virus protection software. This project would have taken days to complete if we had had to install the program at each unit individually. But with the remote management service that we provide, we were able to complete the installation on all of the computers at one company in one day. RMM also plays an important role in keeping all of the computers at a company up to the same standards from machine to machine so that any employee can go to any computer and be assured that the programs that they need and use will be there for them.
 
TRA Consulting’s remote management service to the businesses we support also helps us to be pro-active in preventing potential problems that users might face during their workday. For example, we can block an incompatible update from installing onto computers where the update might cause problems. I talked about this in a previous blog post where we found that Internet Explorer 11 was causing compatibility problems with a banking add-on that allowed check-printing. In that case we were able to learn of the problem ahead of time through one or two early reporters, and then block future installations for all other computers at that site so that others never even experienced the problems.