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If you have Windows deployed in your environment and you’re looking for a free way to remotely assist your users when they need help, you have the Remote Assistance tool available. By default though, it’s setup to require the user to prompt you for assistance. We’d like to avoid that and instead just have a single pop-up appear on their screen asking if it’s okay to give you the controls.

Prerequisites: Windows, Group Policy Management, proper rights to be able to create GPO’s on your domain, and a winning attitude… because that’s what we’re doing here guys - we’re winning.

Step 1: Create Security Group

First thing is first - head over to AD and create a security group which will contain your IT staff who will have rights to assist users on your domain. Make sure to name the security group something relevant like “Remote Helpers” or whatever. It’s your domain, you do you.

Step 2: Create GPO

Now head over to Group Policy Management. There are two ways you can approach this portion. You can either add this policy into your Default Domain Policy so it applies to everybody on the domain or just create a new GPO and set it wherever you’d like. I’ll leave that decision up to you.

To set this policy, open up your GPO and navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Remote Assistance. In this directory you will find a policy called "Configure Offer Remote Assistance, which is the policy we want to open up and edit.

Set this policy to ENABLED and then in the options, choose “Allow helpers to remotely control the computer” and then choose your security group from the first step.

Click OK and exit out of the GPO.

Step 3: Create shortcut

4755ae9960dcfff8f8690d9e990dc922a21fd0e2d9e7f95eb83cbc3891612ff2_remote-assistance.png
4755ae9960dcfff8f8690d9e990dc922a21fd0e2d9e7f95eb83cbc3891612ff2_remote-assistance.png539×768 72 KB

Now, either manually or by GPO, create a shortcut on your IT staffs desktops for the following:

%windir%\system32\msra.exe /offerra

This will skip the unnecessary clicks and just go straight to the prompt asking you which machine you’d like to connect to. Once you punch that in, the user will receive a prompt saying you’d like to connect and they can either say Yes or No.

Now you’re ready to IT like a boss and bug your users with endless prompts to take over controls.

Another pro-tip: there is a chat function while you are controlling their computer so you can talk back and forth just in case you traveled through time and you’re working in an office where phones haven’t been invented yet.

Happy remote assisting!

28 Spice ups
2

Thank you Brandon. Very useful. I personally haven’t done that before. Now I have something else to do tonight lol.

3

We have been using Bomgar but id like to dump it and give this a try. We usually turn it off but im gonna give it a try for sh*ts and giggles. Thanks Brandon, ill let you know how it goes.

4

Thanks for your knowledge sharing. Worth it…thank you again sir

5

Thanks for posting the switch to the executable! This saves me clicks.

6

Just a quick question. How will the user know his or her IP address/Hostname?

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I’d also like to give a bump to the question above!

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If you know the hostname of the computer (which hopefully you track this per user) then you could simply do it per hostname or just ping it for the IP. Otherwise you could have something like bginfo running on the endpoints so the user knows their IP. You could also just put a simple batch script that displays their IP when they double click it.

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testing comment to check why I can’t read the other comments, will delete later

10

We would like to deploy the icon for the user with a quick link to request support.