We’re getting very close to releasing Windows Vista to manufacturing – the excitement is building!  I’ve decided now that I have a little more time that I would start posting some entries about my observations on Windows Vista, with the great new blogging spot on http://windowsvistablog.com.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is what’s my favorite feature in Windows Vista.  Some of you may know that it’s ASLR.  But, frankly, there are so many cool things in Windows Vista that it’s super hard in general to pick my other favorites.  What I find more interesting, is some of the experiences that I have had or that I have seen others have that simply weren’t possible (at least for mere mortals) before Windows Vista.  The other day I had just such an experience.

I was sitting in my office doing some work on my PC, when I got a request for Remote Assistance via IM from someone at my house.  Like many people, I not only have a full time job, in addition to being a husband and a parent, but I am also tech support for my family and friends.  In this case, someone in my house was having a problem accessing some files that were folder redirected (using client-side caching) to a server in our house.  (I know most people do not have servers in their houses, but that’s not the key part of the story.)  So she saw that I was online and she asked me for help.

Without Remote Assistance, the problem would have had to wait until I could physically get to her machine or I would have had to try and talk her through the problem on the phone.  Even with Windows XP, it would have been hard to help her since it was previously so difficult to actually establish a Remote Assistance connection if you had to go across a firewall that used Network Address Translation (NAT) as so many firewalls do.  However, this is not a problem with Windows Vista.  For Windows Vista, we added the ability to cross NAT firewalls.  We also improved the way that Remote Assistance works so that it requires less bandwidth (so it runs faster).  We also made it a stand-alone application so that you don’t have to launch it from the Help and Support Center.

So once I connected back to her PC in our house, I quickly realized that the root cause of her problem was that she did not have the proper rights to access some redirected folders that she needed on the server.  Even though she is not an administrator on the server, I was able to use Remote Assistance to launch a Remote Desktop session from her desktop to our home server (logging on with my admin account, of course), fixed her access rights, and she was back in business.  Think about it.  I remote-connected to her machine and then hopped across from her machine to another machine in the house (in this case a server).  Pretty cool.

There are obviously a huge number of IT scenarios that are possible using Remote Assistance, many of which apply to small and medium-sized businesses as well.  The benefit to those of us who spend time doing tech support for our friends and family is one more reason why Windows Vista is a must-have.  In this case it let me solve the problem and get back to work without having to debug a NAT firewall or go through the painful process of walking someone through a complex diagnosis without the benefit of being able to see the screen.

Call me a geek, but that defines cool for me!

Jim