Old faithful - remote access made incredibly simple
Updated July 15, 2021
Old faithful - remote access made incredibly simple
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with TeamViewer
TeamViewer is used for remote technical support with some of our customers. There's been many a time a customer requires some support with an issue and it's just simpler and quicker if we can take over the machine and resolve it ourselves. We've used different solutions for this over the years but TeamViewer has always been our go-to when nothing else is in already in place.
- Doesn't require any port forwarding on either end of the connection.
- Probably the simplest remote desktop tool to use, ideal for non tech-savvy customers.
- Very easy to initiate connections. You just need the partner ID and passcode for the remote machine and everything else takes care of itself.
- Graphical performance is good, with minimal lag.
- The TeamViewer software update process has failed for us on a number of occasions, requiring us to uninstall and re-install it.
- The commercial pricing is quite expensive. We get some customers who don't wish to pay this for something they use relatively infrequently, forcing us to choose a cheaper solution.
- You may have issues connecting with remotes if each machine is running a different version. This doesn't have often, but we have had situations where a customer machine has not updated properly and we can not connect until it has.
- We're able to resolve customer support issues quickly because we can share the same machine, looking at the same thing.
- Customers seem to be much more comfortable taking on new tech if they know we can help them out whenever they get stuck.
- It's allowed us to do some business remotely that we just couldn't have done before - especially important to us right now during the COVID-19 pandemic.
RealVNC is an alternative to TeamViewer that we like a lot. However, we tend to only use RealVNC for our own in-house access, and TeamViewer for everything else, including access to customer machines. The main reason for this is because RealVNC is just slightly more complicated to install and set up, which is not ideal for non tech-savvy customers. TeamViewer, in comparison, is dead simple to install and pretty much ready to go immediately.
Do you think TeamViewer delivers good value for the price?
Not sure
Are you happy with TeamViewer's feature set?
Yes
Did TeamViewer live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of TeamViewer go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy TeamViewer again?
Yes
TeamViewer Feature Ratings
TeamViewer Security and Support
We have not yet found the need to purchase premium support for TeamViewer but would consider doing so if the need arises.
We often use TeamViewer for access to customer, as well as our own, machines. Security is a major concern of ours, and as such, we took a long time to evaluate the different options and alternatives. Thankfully, TeamViewer ticked all the boxes for us.
For those times we need to access customer workstations for providing support, our customers can fire up TeamViewer and provide us (typically over the phone) with the automatically generated random password that their TeamViewer software provides. This works great because it's super simple whilst ensuring a cryptographically secure password is used.
In other situations, we sometimes need to access specific machines remotely whilst there isn't a user nearby to enable access for us on a case by case basis. For these situations, TeamViewer allows us to use what it calls Easy Access. Essentially, this allows us to assign machines at both ends of the connection to our TeamViewer account, authorising the connection to each other whenever we need it. Perfect!
In addition to Easy Access, you also have the option to use two-factor authentication. We already use this for most of our own machines and are starting to implement it with all of our customers too. With this in place, we feel the security offered by TeamViewer is excellent.
Finally, we also intend to implement TeamViewer's Conditional Access features. This should allow us to restrict all connections to specific IP addresses, ensuring operators outside of our company or our customer's company, are blocked from ever being able to initiate a connection.
We would absolutely buy TeamViewer again. After trialling various other options, nothing else comes close in terms of ease-of-use whilst being very secure. Previously, we were using VNC solutions over a dedicated VPN network connection. This worked well to some degree, but was a nightmare to use for general support issues with new customers. TeamViewer gives us the piece of mind from a security point of view, whilst being dead easy for customers to grapple with.