Rescue is a remote
support solution for PCs, Macs, and mobile devices. Rescue is designed to help IT teams to
offer fast technical support and ensure a secure remote
support session for both the IT professional and the end user. From small
teams of IT helpdesk technicians to enterprise-level organizations, Rescue aims to offer the…
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Parallels Desktop
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Parallels Desktop is a virtual user session solution built to run Windows on Macintosh computers without rebooting. It is designed for OS X Yosemite with one-click tuning.
Not all of our team members are as PC computer savvy as we would like, Rescue allows any issue that arises to be quickly and correctly solved the first time no matter the level of comfort with our systems. We have not come across any situations where it did not work for our set up.
I often get asked, why not the "free" stuff (VirtualBox), and/or why not VMWare. VirtualBox, etc. are not as performant for interactive usage. I think they are fine for small applications, perhaps some enterprise app usage, but for developers, it's not good enough. VMWare has become too enterprisey and lacks some of the user-friendly stuff that Parallels focuses on. Ultimately, for developer types running OSes for deep tasks, Parallels is unrivaled.
The rescue lens feature has come in handy to save us plenty of times. being able to have eyes on the end users' side to see how things are actually physically connected.
Having the ability to collaborate with other technicians is a feature that I have not seen in other applications. normally the other person has to connect as well which results in lowered connection speed on the end user's side since 2 connections are running.
The tools to be able to locate and audit sessions are also very valuable for measuring the performance of my technicians.
File Transfer - You can easily transfer files between Parallels virtualized desktops and the host desktop either through Copy and Paste functionality, or Drag and Drop. You can also configure shared folders.
Switch Between Virtual and Host Desktop - You can configure swipe gestures on a MacBook Pro to be able to switch between the virtualized and host desktop. You can also launch apps from the OS X Taskbar.
Performance - Apps in Parallels run quite smoothly on my 2015 MacBook Pro, as of 2020. Considering they are running on a 5-year-old computer, I give Parallels top marks for performance.
The ability to do snapshots, backups, and other types of branching for VMs is a little confusing and takes a bit to get used to
The Parallels tools frequently pop up windows advertising functionality, while this is helpful at times it can also happen when you are doing a presentation or typing in a password.
Careful using the VMs on a shared cloud drive such as Dropbox or OneDrive, there are hundreds and sometimes thousands of files which are updated when running a VM and this can clog up your Dropbox or OneDrive sync for minutes to hours even on a 2gb connection.
We may continue using Logmein as it is the best remote support application in terms of connection latency and control. However, since several of our client sites have stricter security policies they block this application and we have to switch to other ways which is inconvenient
Users are familiar with the application which will keep us going for a little while. However since we are seeing a decline for a need for the software, I wouldn't be surprised to find that this answer changes dramatically in the near future. We would probably keep it to some extent, but we would probably reduce our licensing count.
LogMeIn Rescue is easy to start and use and does not consume resources on your computer slowing it down. We are also often providing support for non-tech savvy end users who might have a hard time downloading and installing remote access software, especially when firewall warnings start to appear. LogMeIn Rescue's process is intuitive and easy to follow for our users.
It has a good integration, including the connection of peripherals. Taking files back and forth works well and I can attach my Home drive as a network drive in Windows. There is even integration with iCloud and other macOS services. There are also a few different display modes which are useful and fleixible (coherence, windowed, full-screen with multiple screens)
I'd say support for LogMeIn is ideal because I haven't ever been in a situation where additional support was necessary. The program runs so efficiently and simply that nothing was needed beyond initial training that was provided by my company. I am saying this as a user that strictly uses the technician console
So, this rating is a little skewed toward older behavior from Parallels, as I haven't had to contact them recently. However, in an older version of Parallels, an "update" included pop-ups urging users to upgrade to the latest version, implying that their current version wouldn't work for the latest MacOS. I found it very frustrating to be getting ads for a new version of the software in a version I had already paid for. I contacted support about this and got a generic, uncaring response. It was pretty disappointing.
UI (user interface) is pretty easy to use, you can use rescue from a desktop version or the web when others such as dameware you needed to have the software installed and the affected user needed to be on VPN, so you could take over their system. TeamViewer is good but with Rescue you can link your chat support team members and rescue to work from the same system. Other benefits in rescue is that you can add Ticket to track your IT personnel usage for reporting purpose. For instance if you want to track-down how many sessions the agent A did on a day and link the Ticket from your ITSM system with the information in rescue. I didn't see this option in other tools
Main two features that made the balance decission go to the Parallels Desktop were the possibility to pause the Windows partition easily (allowing to consume less resources in Mac and save battery) and the other one is the user interface feature called "Coherence" with allows you to show the Windows application windows as if they were native to the macOS, allowing for a better user experience.
Avoid extra costs: majority of users have a Mac, so if they needed to dod something that is Windows related, it will require to users have an extra computer to do that tasks, and this have a lot of costs
Developers have more concerns how websites behaves on Windows only browsers, which increased the satisfaction of users
