Fog Creek Copilot is pretty cool
Fog Creek Software’s Copilot service is one of those might-come-in-handy-someday services I’ve had filed in the back of my mind for a while now, but never actually had to use. Yesterday I had to help my grandfather with a problem on his computer, and knew I didn’t want to spend hours having him read me dialog boxes and click buttons in the hopes things would just work out.
If your grandfather is anything like mine, walking him through setting up an SSH tunnel through his router to a VNC server on his desktop is about as unlikely to succeed as running Visual Studio 2005 for eight contiguous hours, and just as frustrating. Fortunately, I remembered Copilot, and the awesome usability courtesy the influence of Joel Spolsky, who may be self-righteous and preachy at times, but definitely knows how to make software.
I bought a $5 day pass (it should be noted at no point was I required to register, create a password, or jump through any of the other bullshit hoops I otherwise would have if the service was run by any other company), got a 12-digit invitation code, and downloaded a ~750KB client w/ my invitation code hard-coded in it. I fired up the client, which connected to Copilot’s servers and waited for Grandpa to connect.
On his end, I directed him to copilot.com (thank God his Internet connection was working), read him the invite code, and walked him through the one-click download and run (no install; another Spolsky innovation); automatically, just like that, he was in, prompted to allow me to connect, and I had remote control of his system. He has dual monitors, and I saw them as one large contiguous desktop, and could drag windows between screens without difficulty. When I was done, the client software offered to delete itself. Slick.
This is definitely worthwhile for cases when you need to do a little remote support, and for reasons of user sophistication, firewalls, or both, you can’t set up your own SSH and VNC/Remote Desktop connection. Currently at AppAssure where I work we use GoToMeeting for remote support tasks, and I think Copilot would make for a much better solution (plus the new version has some basic branding features, so we could even brand it with our logo and domain name).