There have been several remote access posts here, but I don’t see one from the past few years so I was curious what people are using to accomplish the following 2 goals:
Support Technicians can remote into any PC/Mac without the end-user being there to approve
Staff member can remote into their office PC from home without VPN/RDP/etc.
We’re still using LogMeIn Central which is perfect for us, but each year we renew I have to see the legacy $300/year price tag that worked fine for us, right next to the new bills that are over 10x that amount…
I’m hoping to reduce the need of remote access to local resources in general by moving most staff to M365, but we still have a lot of obscure software packages that rely on local resources.
We use a modified version of VPN. We have a web page our users sign into over an secure link. This gets into a page where they can see the computers they have remote access to with MS Remote Desktop. I can assign which computers they have access to. As the administrator I have remote access to all the computers. This only costs us the cost of the Domain name for the secure link.
You might want to take a look at Splashtop. When Logmein kept raising their prices, I switched to Splashtop and have been fairly happy.
Annual rate is $466.65 for 100 computers that the software is installed on. I then organize the computers and users into groups for remote access. For instance, all the media computers are added to a group that can be accessed by the media staff who are members of that group.
I also added the Splashtop SOS package for 1 technician ($199) to be able to access any other computer that does not have the software installed via a session code. This enables me to help anyone, including non-staff.
I also still use Apple Remote Desktop onsite to compliment Splashtop.
We’re happy Connectwise Control (formerly ScreenConnect) users. I highly recommend it. We use it more like your first listed goal, but you should be able to accomplish #2 with it fairly easily too.
If you need yet one more approval, we have loved ConnectWise Control as well! Very full-featured and easy to use. It does require a lot of permissions to be applied to work on macOS Big Sur (but what doesn’t these days?), which can be confusing to users. But definitely a great tool once set up!
We moved from logme in to connectwise as well after all of the price hikes. I did like log me in much more but connectwise gets the job done too for much less.
I switched from TeamViewer to Splashtop about a year ago as TeamViewer was too expensive. I’ve been pleased. Splashtop is easier to use, cheaper, handles multiple monitors well and the iPad app doesn’t disconnect when you minimize it.
