Item: ScreenConnect
Rating: 10
Author: Ryan Timmons

Overall Satisfaction with ConnectWise Control (formerly ScreenConnect)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Screen Connect to remotely access every computer across all our business entities and customer networks. It allows us to easily remotely troubleshoot and resolve issues on pretty much every end-user device anywhere in the world.

Pros and Cons

Pros

The connections are reliable and smooth.
Transferring and receiving files from remote computers is straightforward and typically works perfectly.
Running commands from the dashboard without needing to connect to an end-user machine means we can easily run one-off commands without impacting workflows!

Cons

The access side of Screen Connect doesn't organize computers very well, you can give them essentially a tag or create groups based on SQL-like expressions, but it's a bit awkward, I'm not sure what the best way to improve that would be. Perhaps adding another tab that automatically sorts them by domain or IP range?
The remote computer HAS to have a monitor attached or the connection will display a black screen, generally, this isn't an issue but it means that you cannot remotely administer headless servers very well.
By default when you connect to a remote machine it throws all of your printers on that machine, some programs (particularly older ones) don't like that. If we could choose just one printer to send to (or none) when we want (like a button in the toolbar to send printers) that would solve that issue. Currently, the only way to fix this is to disable sending printers entirely
The licenses are locked using some form of a per-machine link, so if you have one license as we do and accidentally leave a connection on when you head out of the office you can not use Connectwise until you manage to close that connection. I've limited connections to two hours to automatically end them but this is still a real problem. There should be some way to end a connection from the dashboard to free up licenses.
The toolbox is a bit awkward and doesn't seem to work well, but that might be me not doing something right

Return on Investment

Allowing us to remotely support end-users without physically being on location saves time and money.
Being able to quickly diagnose and resolve problems makes customers happy.
Being able to solve issues occasionally without impacting user work-flows via remote commands or backstage tinkering is a very nice feature that also keeps customers happy.

Other Software Used

ITarian, GoToMeeting, GoToMyPC

Likelihood to Recommend

Screen connect is a very good tool for remote support and works extremely well most of the time. I use it for consistent access to in-house and client computers and as immediate support for call-ins that we don't necessarily have set up with 24/7 connections. It lacks in a few quality of life areas such as the connection groupings and is missing a few key elements that would help with specific scenarios, such as being able to end active connections from the dashboard or being able to remotely control headless machines.

ScreenConnect Feature Ratings

Comments

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Ian Murphy
commented 5 years ago
Not sure why you had problems with headless servers. Most of the servers we manage don't have monitors and I've never noticed any problems. I'm not sure how organizing by domain or ip would help you, but you could auto-populate a field with those values and group by them if you really wanted to.

Great product but could use improvement in some areas to make it amazing.