Steve,
I'm curious, are you using UltraVNC/VNC by ancy chance, or did you find some other FOSS project to use?

David, do you know if what you thought was going to happen with the next release (3.1 is now out) was implemented? Meaning, a person with a single Pro license could install it on as many of the machines they manage from as needed?

That would be a MAJOR sticking point for me purchasing a Pro license.

I currently have a single home desktop and 2 personal laptops I've also connected out from my dad's house, where he has a single desktop and single laptop. I also have installed on 2 or 3 desktop PCs at the church i am a part of and am the volunteer tech admin/tech support. Those are all non-profit use cases for connecting into and out from. Any of the desktops I connect in to are, more often than not, using unattended access.

For the schools I work for (my paid job), I have 3 work owned desktops that are mine that I may connect out from, as well as several potential laptops. I connect into the desktops using unattended mode frequently. I also have at least one "management PC" at each of my schools where I don't have my own desktop PC. If I'm remoting into one of those, it would almost always be using unattended mode. At our educational CoOp office, i've also set up the finance lady to be able to remote into her work desktop PC from home, so she could access her financial software. I use either UltraVNC or Microsoft Remote Desktop to remote to any other end-user device/server within the school districts or Coop (No MSP360 Remote Desktop/Connect).

For personal use (connecting into my home PC, my dad's, one of the church devices), I honestly have a hard time coughing up a yearly license. I've also used TeamViewer in the past to connect to other friends' and family members' PC to help them. But, generally in those use cases, the friend/family member could approve the connection if using the free version, so free would work in those cases (but that is the minority of my use case on the personal end). I would "consider" purchasing a $89 a year for my personal use, but would be much more likely if it was less expensive, or if I could make a one-time purchase.

For work use, I could see my Coop paying a yearly $89 for me to use. But I couldn't see them paying $89 for each machine that I use (including home/personal devices), that I may use to use to connect to one of the few RD/Connect machines in the schools and Coop that I remote into. I'd really love my 3 district tech directors and our 1 district tech assistant to also be able to use the unattended access into our management PCs. And what would be fantastic, is to be able to purchase the manged licence to push out the agent to all of our District and Coop PCs and Macs and let any of our tech staff remote into.

Last time i talked to sales, there were still enough items not working on the manged client side, and I'm thinking the pricing might have been prohibitive for us to have moved forward with. I haven't talked to sales again lately, though one has reached back out to me, so i need to. If memory serves me right, there were several client settings that couldn't be set in the management console when I had demo'd it (including not being able to set/see/manage the encryption and MFA settings. Maybe this has improved in the last few months???

The other work use-case where i had used the free product, COVID in March 2020. Me and my other district tech staff installed Remote Assistant on about 100-150 Kindergarden through 4th grade student devices that were getting sent home. We wanted to be able to support those students at home if needed. Those devices don't go home now, so we discontinued that usage, but it was great for the time students were at home! (we copied the config files from a single install onto all other devices, so they all had the same PIN code, and a batch file that we used to accomplish it with, also logged every install out to a location on our network, so we knew which machines had it installed and configured. (fyi, batch file ran the RA installer, then copied our config file over, then we finished the install where each machine got it's own unique machine ID.)

At the current time, I've rolled Connect back to the last version of MSP360 Remote Desktop on all the machines I use and turned off automatic updating, so that I can continue using it. I'm sure this will stop working at some point, just like older versions of Remote Assistant stopped being supported and working.

I've gotten Microsoft Remote Desktop through RD Gateway (and free Cisco Duo MFA) set up at two of my districts, so honestly I could completely drop using any other product for those two locations. I'd keep using UltraVNC/MS Remote Desktop to connect from the management PC/server to any other device within that network. But, I don't have that set up at my other school or the Coop.

Long and windy, sorry about that, but figured it would be good feedback for you in seeing how I personally have been using the free product for the last 2 or 3 years.

I can understand why the decision was made (from a business perspective), but not a huge fan of the change to paid unattended access with no warning. I do like the enhancements and progress being made, but not letting folks know this feature was being turned off before an automatic update wasn't a great experience. I currently have 4 devices at 4 schools that I was remoting in to periodically, and to all of a sudden be told I couldn't do an unattended session, was an unpleasant surprise to say the least!

For temporary fix/workaround, I've rolled back these 4 machines and set to not auto-update)

I also have it on my personal home PC, and I'll never be there to accept an incoming connection, so not sure if you're wanting to force a paid subscription for those scenarios? I also have the software on our church Media PC, and may connect in to it to do something remotely periodically (even when no-one is there). Same for my Dad's home PC. I might connect into it to look at something when at a time he is not there to let me in. Those three scenarios are not paid solutions, so for me to pay to connect into those three, makes me want to look for another free solution for those particular cases. And I'd understand if you were OK with that from a business standpoint, just stinks for those of us who may be using it for non-interactive personal or small use-case scenarios.

I am considering the purchase of (a) license(s) for my 4 school locations (, but still doesn't make sense for me to pay for the personal use cases).

Don't want to come across as ungrateful for a product that I have not been paying for up to this point, but figured you deserved some honest feedback.

Thanks!
Jared

Never told you thanks for the link to the command line install options, so a bit belated, but thanks!

Any way we might be able to provide an encryption key with command line install? That might include pointing a already existing config file. I've discovered that copying a config file from a previously installed copy will keep the encryption key on the second machine. This is EXTREMELY helpful when wanting to have same security settings on a group of computers. Keeping track of separate encryption keys for EVERY SINGLE install is a bit too much so have gone to copying config files as part of installation in some of my use cases.

Also, ability to set PIN and/or password, along with other settings of a silent install would be FANTASTIC! Again, this could be accomplished with being able to point to a config file with the installer command line options.

Thanks!
Jared

,

Noticing that when remoted into 2.4 machine, the "Check for Updates" is still not there in the Remote Desktop menu on the remote machine, same as @AlexSeidel said was the case in release 2.3.

I have noticed this being a problem with not being able to remotely update some of my machines. On a couple of them, I still luckily happened to have a copy of another party's remote support app and was able to get Remote Desktop client updated within the other app's 5 minute connection timelimit.

Would really really love to see remote update capability brought back in a 2.4 patch or when 2.5 get released. Makes is quite hard to not be able to remotely update those machines on 2.3 and 2.4.

FYI, do absolutely LOVE the multi-connect support that we got in version 2.4!!!

Thanks!

An noticed today that previously was on v2.4.0.47 and today Check for update, showed version 2.4.1.19 so would be nice to know fixes in this last update as well if willing to share!

Thanks!

Can you add my name to the request as well? Would love an MSI and/or silent install capabilities!