ConnectWise ScreenConnect Room for Improvement

SS
Technology and Logistics Director at a media company with 501-1,000 employees

From my standpoint, I'm quite happy with this solution. There's nothing more I would want to do with it for improvement.

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Todd Blake - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Specialist at COMMUNITY HEALTH CONNECTIONS INC

It overlaps with some of their other products a little bit right now. I would like to see more overlap, meaning, I would like to be able to see what processes are running on a computer, for example, or what services are running. However, they have another product for that, so they're never going to add that usability to this product even though it would be more useful for us to have it all under one umbrella.

It does not need any other features. It is already as robust as it can be.

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Jon McWilliams - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technology Specialist at CMIT Solutions

The solution should add the ability to video chat with the user on the other end.

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Buyer's Guide
ConnectWise ScreenConnect
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about ConnectWise ScreenConnect. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
ME
Principal Consultant at Ellnet

All the features provided by the product in terms of screen connectors have been good.

There can be some complexities when running patches or when building up all the profiles, making them areas where improvements are required. There is some amount of effort required to learn the platform, but it is pretty reliable once it starts running in your organization's environment. The aforementioned areas can be considered for improvement.

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MS
SA at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like ConnectWise Control to be more transparent on the real costs to renew their license. When we tender a renewal with our vendors, the vendors see the cost of a new license and not the renewal fee so they quote us higher than what it actually is.

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VD
IT System and Network Administrator at a maritime company with 10,001+ employees

The on-prem installation uses something like an Emulator, which emulates the Windows environment to a written application to run on Linux. We faced different issues related to security which are easier to overcome on a Windows machine. Also, the configuration and maintenance are easier when the implementation is done on a Windows Server if we are speaking on-prem version.

There is if documentation of ConnectWise Control on-premise, however, on a Linux machine, there are different limitations that are not there on a Windows Server. Much more limitations exist on Linux deployments.

Companies that support some others in computer-related things or large organizations that have an internal service desk support team should be able to connect to own devices and assist employees in case trouble happens.

In the on-prem version, operators need to tell those they are assisting to visit a webpage, where they will see a welcome screen banner and they must enter their ID. After that, a small client must be installed on the computer. For large corporates that have introduced different security measures, such as Microsoft Adblock, sometimes it can be an issue to connect. 

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Cobus Burgers - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Director at NETCB

At the moment, there's absolutely no specific feature that we actually need additionally since all the features that we need are available. There may even still be some features that we are not using. At the moment we don't see any new features that could improve the system. 

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MikeChacker - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager Global Service Delivery at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I really didn't care for the onboarding process and it is something that should be improved. They just sent me an email and said, "Hey, here's your account", and I have a group of folks using it. I had to go through and figure out specifically how to do it. It's really a combination of onboarding and support. It wasn't great. I would have rather them just let me upload a list of who all needs it and then send everyone directions on how to get it.

I would love to see the ability to send out bulk updates to third-party tools through their command line. This would mean being able to write a script and execute it on a group of machines, all at the same time.

In my past, I've used software like Dameware Mini Remote Control, which is now part of SolarWinds. In that software, the reporting was very good. For example, you could specify a group of machines and send a query to ask a question like how many of them have Adobe Reader installed. The report would be generated pretty easily.

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MikeChacker - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager Global Service Delivery at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

There could be improvement to the remote command line tools. You can do what they call "Backstage," and run commands behind the scenes. It's a little quirky.

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it_user305649 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Admin at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees

While I found the documentation to be adequate, others in our IT department did not. My immediate supervisor said it was lacking in documentation and had “too many words” to describe how to use the product when crafting instructions to send to our third party consultant who was going to connect to our system behind our firewall.

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RS
Senior IT and Telecommunications Consultant Extraordinaire~ at a tech services company

The complaints I have are more regarding my side - not on the users' side - regarding setting up. For my company, just installing the software and using it is very easy. But if I need to give one of my customers access to their machines, the process that you have to go through is some 15 to 20 steps. You have to create a group, and then you have to assign a policy. It takes 15 to 20 minutes to set up someone for remote access to their own machine. When I was using LogMeIn Central, that process was just as simple as sending an email and having the person create an account. It's much more of a pain in that respect. If they could fix that, make that more automated, that would greatly help improve the quality of the product.

Also, here's the biggest thing. What we need this product to do is to be able to control Windows Updates. LogMeIn Central allowed us remote access but also allowed us to push and install Windows Updates, and third-party updates. LogMeIn Central raised their price extremely high, so we ended up finding this solution and going with it. But there is a new product on the market called the Atera. It does everything ConectWise does, but it also does all the patching and Windows Updates. Eventually, we're going to be moving to them and shutting off ConnectWise. Not only does Atera do Windows Updates and patching, it has a ticketing system built in, remote control, unattended access, file transfer, printer sharing, etc.

When we made the switch to ConnectWise we lost the ability to do patching. That forced us, for our larger clients, to move to WSUS. We had to set up a VM on those larger clients to push Windows Updates and patches into the network until we found Atera. We have both ConnectWise and another product installed because ConnectWise won't do patches for people that are not on a domain. If I have 15 or 18 computers in a workgroup, I can't use the WSUS to push updates. I have to use a third-party tool to do patch management. If ConnectWise wants to keep people on their product, they need to integrate patch management.

The reason we still have ConnectWise is because we just haven't had the time to learn Atera yet, because it's an entirely new system and with a new UI. It does so much more than what ConnectWise does that it's taking us time to learn how to use it. Eventually though, once the guys feel comfortable enough, we will probably discontinue using ConnectWise. That is, we will discontinue the unattended access product but keep the on-demand product.

Another issue is that the ConnectWise installation software is not recognized by Microsoft as a legit piece of software. So any time we go to install it, it will pop up a screen saying that the software is unrecognized and that it could be malware. If we're in front of a client when this happens, we have to explain to the client, "Oh, this is just a Microsoft thing." But we never had that problem with other solutions. We don't have the problem with Atera, and we never had that problem with LogMeIn Central's installer. But this solution actually comes up in Smart Screen as if it's malware, when it shouldn't.

The other problem we have is using this product on Apple devices; it's the same thing. During the Apple installation, it comes up as blocked in Apple, because Apple doesn't recognize it as a certified install. What happens is, I can't install the software remotely because there are eight steps you have to go through on an Apple machine to actually make the software work because Apple blocks it. Again, it thinks it's malware. 

So this issue is happening and is even worse on Apple products than Windows products. With Windows, you have to tell it to install it anyway and it will install; it's just an extra step. And with the way people are really wary these days about malware, we have to say to clients, "No, really, it's okay, it's just Microsoft, it's not malware, we promise."

That needs to be fixed. They need to get their signed certificate updated into Microsoft's database at the least. We don't have a whole lot of Apple computers that we support. It's not a huge issue for us and it certainly wouldn't be something we'd leave ConnectWise because of, but the issue with Microsoft is a big issue. Some 400 to 500 of our endpoints are Microsoft operating systems.

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RH
IT Manager

I don't really have any suggestions for improvement. I didn't even use the full ConnectWise suite. I'm sure if I did, there would be other good stuff, too.

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it_user493377 - PeerSpot reviewer
President at IBF Consulting

I would like to see a full-blown fat client/desktop application. LogMeIn has a desktop client which makes it much more convenient to access my computer list and create ad-hoc sessions rather than navigate to a web page and login.

I would like to see more user-friendly configuration. Setting up permissions are possible but not easy to do. Setting up permissions and groups in the portal is NOT simple or intuitive by any stretch. It’s actually convoluted and took me a while to figure out how to accomplish it. It’s done with Roles and you need to assign users to roles, (not roles to users) and then associate the groups with roles. Here is a quick screenshot to illustrate:


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MM
Senior Marketing Analyst at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Other product have the ability to merge both monitors into one space when logging in if a customer has more than one monitor set up on their station. Essentially, you are just seeing one big blob of screens that you can move your mouse through versus having to switch between the different monitors which are on the workstation with ScreenConnect.

There is one back-end issue that I am running into at some of locations where I login to provide support, and sometimes port 443 is blocked. That is what it uses to connect. So, I am having to do workarounds to get a session started.

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AW
IT Manager

Reporting could definitely use improvement. With LogMeIn Rescue, I used to be able to, for instance, at the end of the month, pull off a report of every session. It was very simple, very easy, I could see the name that was typed in, the IP address of the computer that it was connected to, if it was running Windows, how long the session was, when it started, when it finished, how long the person was active for, etc. I could also go back over any period of time, so I could say, "Okay, in February last year, how many support sessions did we do?" And I could break it down for a client.

It just doesn't seem - there might be but I haven't found it - to be a way of pulling that information out of this product. ConnectWise doesn't seem to be anywhere near any of that functionality, that I'm aware of.

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it_user577335 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Support Specialist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The tool seems fairly reliant of bandwidth. If the connection is not strong, it can lag behind quite a bit. It can also be time consuming to walk everyone through the plugin that installs for it.

However, the main issue I have seen with it is that, if they are having issues with their web browsers or network, there is really no way to connect with it.

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Cobus Burgers - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Director at NETCB

Since my last report three years ago on ConnectWise Control they have addressed my entire wish list for future enhancements.

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AH
CTO at Hanatech

The solution is a little bit complicated when you want to implement it.

That could be because of the number of features. If there was some simpler way for non-technical people to just implement it. 

The solution should update a few of its features.

We still need to get acquainted with the system. We've only been using it for a few months, so everything is still new.

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it_user487569 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

The only slowdown I've seen is when quality settings are set to high - and this is primarily on Windows 10 machines that show a picture on the lock-screen prior to the password entry screen. It takes a while to load the screen image in high quality, and this slows down the process of logging in (basically until it loads I can't proceed to the password screen and type it in). I usually switch it over to medium quality and that takes care of it. It would be handy if I could set a default quality, or if there is a way to black out that screen like the desktop background does.

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it_user886185 - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO

Support for PAC files on the guest's side and support for proxy on the host's side. Currently, there is no support for guest-side PAC files or for the host-side proxy (which uses authentication). If I can have this, it would be improvement. It would benefit my organization because we would be able to connect with guests using PAC files in their environment, then connect to our server from a proxy environment (which uses authentication).

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it_user879279 - PeerSpot reviewer
Dentist at a wellness & fitness company

I'm presuming that the software is designed as it is for a particular reason. An option I would want would want to have is a shortcut on my desktop, to click on it, and immediately be able to select which system I wanted to access and which computer in that system I wanted to access, and have fewer steps that I would have to physically go through to do so. However, I realize that to have it set up that way, there are numerous steps of security that I would have to be gotten around, and I accept the fact that I have to take three or four steps in order to get what I need.

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SA
Manager of Implementation and Support

There needs to be a way to run the agent without installing, like GoToAssist.

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it_user879282 - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner

The biggest room for improvement is in the setup, getting it started. Figuring out how to get it all set up from scratch.

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it_user551919 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Administrator at a tech company with 51-200 employees

We have recently updated our ScreenConnect server to the latest version. This significantly reduced client frustration.

The previous version of ScreenConnect was so old that it was blocked by Windows Defender, SmartScreen, and most anti-virus applications.

The newer version does not have this issue. The onscreen prompts that the user sees when installing the client are much easier to understand.

There are basically only two clicks required to initiate a remote session:

  1. Elect the session you wish to join
  2. Launch the executable that is downloaded
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it_user487545 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Information Technology at a hospitality company with 51-200 employees

The ability to autolock Windows desktop on remote computers after a remote session disconnects would be ideal.

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it_user490680 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Admin at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

At the moment, I cannot use my own domain to install it and use it with my clients. I am forced to use their domain. This is a setback for me, because the previous form of licensing I used, and they told me they no longer support it, I could actually install it on my own computer and use my own domain to access it, but now I cannot. This is one thing they could easily improve.

Another thing is that you can use a web version or you can generate a file to start to work with it. I have some technical issues with the file it generates, because sometimes it cannot install very well. It has some technical issues. It has some bugs to fix.

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it_user487575 - PeerSpot reviewer
Franchise Operations Specialist at a recreational facilities/services company with 501-1,000 employees

The only issues I’ve dealt with are display issues when the end user has a dual monitor setup. I haven't had to address it at all. It was easier to ask the end user to disconnect the second monitor than to call up customer support. I’m sure they’d have a fix I just never got that far.

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it_user882267 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Network Specialist at a educational organization

If it had Chrome capability, that would be great; being able to use it on a Chrome device. Right now, I can't use ScreenConnect on my Chrome device, it has to be on a PC. I know there are other remote services that are capable of utilizing a Chrome device, such as TeamViewer.

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it_user482967 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Process Manager at a construction company with 501-1,000 employees

Only thing I wish is that they would allow you to pick your own username. 

The username is automatically generated by ScreenConnect and you can't choose it. For instance, if I want my username to be rfrancese it can't be. My username is some mix of letters and numbers and when logging on to another computer it's very difficult to remember.

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it_user488754 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sage X3 Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The ease of use in setting up a remote unattended client.

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it_user488757 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at Techexeconline.com

The file transfer function could be a little more robust for multi-file transfers.

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it_user701448 - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder

They could provide a toolbox for the plan I'm on.

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it_user882726 - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Speed is a major factor in Automate, and the control panel is horribly slow.

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it_user701469 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT & Operations at a consumer goods company with 51-200 employees

Mobile interface.

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Buyer's Guide
ConnectWise ScreenConnect
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about ConnectWise ScreenConnect. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.