Embed Remote Support

[rutherfurdsolutions]

Hey All,

Having some difficulty in working out where to even start with this.

We have a vb.net winform application which we have developed for installation on all of our clients computers which monitors performance and alarms and reports them back to us at regular intervals through our web services server online. What we are trying to do is embed a remote support feature into the system so that when requested by our clients we can initiate a remote desktop session which won't blank out their screen (counting our Windows RDP) and allow us to do what needs to be done remotely. We are wanting to embed the server into our client side software, use some form of mediation server as these clients are not all on the same LAN and so access over the internet would be needed but we can't setup a port forward for every client, and embed the support technicians interface into our CRM system for easy access and launch.

We have looked all over and have struggled to find anything which would be appropriate. We are after a self hosted system so counts out products like logmein and TeamViewer (although those are effectively what we are trying to achieve).

Any assistance on where we can look or if someone has already done this and can provide advise on how to go about it it would be much appreciated.

Whatever we use would need to be open source as we would need the ability to make changes to it to make it work with our existing system and ideally it would support user components which would allow it to easily be embedded within our own vb.net applications.

Thanks.

 

[jmcilhinney]

Have you looked into the Remote Assistance feature built into Windows? It's intended for exactly this sort of thing.

 

[rutherfurdsolutions]

Thanks jmcilhinney,

We have already looked at that, considered it, and decided it wouldn't work for us, we need an option which we can initiate from our end, while it is true some of our clients will initiate it themselves most of the connections will be unattended installations on servers which we manage or for clients who don't want to go into the software to initiate the connection, they want to just call up and we can get in, this means we need an option which we can initiate from our end.

It needs to work similar to TeamViewer Host for unattended access or LogMeIn Pro for unattended access. The main reasons why we can't use one of these options is because they are hosted and we need a self hosted option for regulatory reasons, you have to use their software and we need the ability to embed the controls directly into our existing software, and they operate a subscription model and while we are happy to pay for a solution which would do what we aren't too keen on paying regularly for the exact same product, we need a embeddable product which we pay for only once and can keep on using. If there is nothing already on the market which we can use can anyone suggest a way to develop this functionality in house. We looked into EchoVNC but the problem is that EchoVNC has effectively closed down and is no longer being supported or maintained.

Thanks again.

 

[rutherfurdsolutions]

Thought I would add a picture to show the concept which we are looking at.


All connections from the Echo Server to the client computers or the client network firewalls are over the internet. The Echo Server will be hosted on our LAN with a public IP address assigned to it for connecting to it from the outside world.

 

[rutherfurdsolutions]

-- UPDATE --
We have looked into UltraVNC and it's DLL's and ActiveX objects and it looks like it may fit the bill as it comes with the VNC Server, VNC Client component, and the VNC Repeater, the only downside being that it has all been done in C# and we don't use C# as a general rule, we only work with VB.NET and so are running into problems as to how we can use it to integrate into our system. Still keeping this thread open in case anyone has any better ideas on how to do this, if we figure it out ourselves then we will post our resolution to it and mark the topic as resolved.

Thanks.