TeamViewer Pros and Cons

TeamViewer allows us to do multiple controllers on a Host, which is great. We have a lot of Macs in our organization, and TeamViewer being cross-platform is a good thing.

TeamViewer has a lot of options for deploying the Hosts, where you can mass deploy them very easily, and you can pre-configure them.

It saves trips to customer sites, which saves time. I am able to get in there remotely and fix things.

The product and platform work well. That is why I have stay with them so long. The stability has typically been good.

It was worth the investment. You can do file transfers and video calls with it. You can do a lot of copy paste stuff. E.g., if I have a file and want to place it on somebody's machine, I can just copy it off of mine and paste it right on their machine. I don't have to put it in a Dropbox account and have them log into it to pull it off. I can do all that right through TeamViewer. When you're looking at the TeamViewer screen, you think you are working on your own machine.

There have been a couple of times with the handy remote access feature, where I have been asked for something at eight o'clock on a Thursday evening and it is on my desk machine, but I am driving back to my office. With TeamViewer, I can just stay at my home machine, connect to my work machine, and get the data needed without having to drive back across town.

The most valuable feature is you do not need to know the Windows username and password to connect and see the staff screen.

Our computers are spread amongst six physical locations. TeamViewer reduces the need to travel to those offices to help staff.

You can't configure multiple, unattended control passwords on the Mac. On the Mac, there's only one. On Windows, there are multiple unattended control passwords. I have people in different departments. My infrastructure people need to control a server and my developers may need to go into that same server. But I don't want them to have the same password... on the Mac, it can be done but it's extremely clunky and problematic.

Support for mobile devices from Linux has been missing since the Native client was rolled out. This was a nice option, especially when trying to walk somebody who was struggling to understand something on their phone.

If they could figure out a little better solution for the iOS stuff other than just a screen share, even though it's an Apple thing, and Apple doesn't like to give up control of their devices. If they ever got to that point, and I could manipulate an iPad or iPhone, that would be awesome. Since we have a bunch of iPad users who are struggling with doing different things, it would be nice to be able to just jump on and actually show them, "Here, do this, this, and this." Similar to what we do with the laptops, e.g. for training.

On occasion, when remote connection process can't connect to a machine, the error messages aren't always helpful to tell you why you can't connect, as the message doesn't help troubleshoot whether it is too slow, too much interference, etc. I usually have to run to another computer and figure out what is going on, then restart it. The diagnostics could be improved.

The business interface is clunky and not well-documented.

It should have ability to display notes in the computer list.