These days virtualization, high speed internet connections and lots and lots of remote desktop possibilities open a new world of installing or implementing software at a customer.
It’s becoming usual to install software remotely. Giving you the flexibility to work when you want, taking into account time zones, a great benefit. You can install something from Europe on a server in the US without causing downtime during office hours. Thereby continue your daily tasks when a large install or database update is running. Wow, only benefits!
No, in specific scenarios it also brings a bunch of disadvantages. What if a account is locked or you miss specific rights to install the software or download/ upgrade to the latest patch? Right, I think your first thought right now is… Create a checklist, duhhh, pre requisites, requirements etc… but we stay human so a small mistake is made within a split second and computers stay computers… they keep suprising you!
One of those mistakes can cause a delay that, again think of time zones, might take up a whole day. Thereby the urgency of problems you encounter as vendor might be interpreted with a wrong severity when you notify them with an issue. This in contradiction with an onsite visit when you can directly contact the system administrator, DBA or project manager.
The last thing that can make a remote project a real pain is internet connection performance, slow VPNs or disconnecting remote desktop connections.
From a Westbury perspective, I’ve completed several remote implementations of our SMI Suite. Each one of them with a few hiccups as described above. However it saved me a lot of travel time and jet lag.
Looking at the future I think we will continue remote implementations by learning from the bumps we have to take sometimes.
Finally it is not only our call… many customers want us to be onsite to share knowledge on the job and give them a great week when we blast them away with our SMI Suite.
Share your ideas of remote installation/ implementations, both pros and cons.
Richard
