When the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) carried out a review of its IT functions, the university decided it could deliver a better service to staff and students by making greater use of remote assistance tools to improve efficiency in the way it provided technical support.

Based near Kingsway in central London, the LSE’s teaching focuses on the social, political and economic sciences. It currently has about 9,000 students and 1,900 staff, and many of the latter have more than one computer each.

While the LSE’s campus is not large, it does contain many buildings and it can take 15 minutes for a technician to reach the desk of someone reporting a problem. The university had already been using remote support tools for several years, but with limited success.

“We’d been using a remote tool to support staff on-campus only, because of technical difficulties with it,” said Amber Miro, assistant director of IT services at the LSE. “We’d had some resistance from users and IT staff alike.”

Last year, the department underwent a five-yearly review, where the panel concluded it should deliver services in a more efficient manner than always sending staff out to make desk-side visits to fix problems.

“The feeling was that we were not making the best use of our resources and that if we could do remote support properly, we would be more responsive and it would enable us to support students and staff off-campus as well,” Miro said.

A working group was set up to determine requirements, which resulted in a list of functions that the IT department wished to have in any solution the LSE adopted. This included desktop sharing, file transfer capabilities, management tools, call queuing, and a system that was user-friendly and so would not necessitate lots of training.

“We decided we needed a chat and/or videoconferencing capability, because some of the staff might be working abroad and wouldn’t want to call in. We also didn’t want anything that needed a client install, because we wanted to be able to support users running their own PCs,” said Miro.

The LSE was also seeking to deploy its chosen tool within a short space of time, and so decided to consider externally hosted solutions. The group identified a list of five products, which were narrowed down to two ahead of a pilot study to select the final choice.

One of these was LogMeIn Rescue, a web-based tool that enables a technician to connect to a user’s computer and remotely take control to diagnose and solve problems.

Adam Gale, IT support officer at the LSE, said he recommended LogMeIn to the group following his experience of the company’s free remote control tool.

“LogMeIn was one solution I’d been looking at because I’d found it useful at home, so I knew they had a product that would fit the requirements,” he said.

LogMeIn Rescue has many of the same facilities as the firm’s remote control tools, including the ability to transfer files between systems. A user asking for help is typically directed to download a small executable that links their computer to the helpdesk, so a technician can give assistance.

The LSE’s intention was to do full user research, backed by an online survey of those involved in trials of the rival contenders. But it soon became clear that LogMeIn “ticked all the boxes”, according to Miro, whereas the alternative solution was less easy to use and lacked features such as built-in chat for communication between the user and the support technician.

LogMeIn supports Apple’s OS X as well as Windows, a feature that is beneficial for the LSE’s policy of supporting computers owned by students and staff, among whom Mac ownership has been growing.

The university pushed ahead with a pilot of LogMeIn Rescue, and decided it was the product they wanted. However, some issues had to be sorted out before deployment.

“We had to look at how we were going to use the service and set it up with our own support structure ­ we have the equivalent of five helpdesks serving different groups of users ­ and we had to come up with a policy for its use,” said Miro. “We also had to talk to LogMeIn about their pricing structure. They were very good at listening and came up with something we could afford.”

LogMeIn Rescue was deployed to pilot groups during the autumn term of 2007, and finally rolled out as a live service at the beginning of 2008 under the name of Virtual IT Assistance.

So far, the new helpdesk service has met with an extremely good response, according to Gale.

“We’re finding it saves us a great deal of time. With LogMeIn, we can solve a great deal of our users’ problems very quickly ­ within minutes ­ which means we’re saving users’ time as well,” he said.

More than 95 per cent of users given technical support via the new system expressed satisfaction with it, according to the LSE, and the problems have been few and far between.

“Apart from one instance of a browser crash, there have been no issues so far,” said Gale. Even in this case, he said he was able to pick up the call again where he had left off after logging back in again.