Interacting with Live User Sessions: Managing User Processes Remotely

So far in this five part series, we have gone over how you can change user group policy restrictions and take screenshots of live user sessions. These ControlUp features are straightforward and allow you to assist end-users by accessing live user sessions in the easiest and quickest way possible, without disrupting work routines and productivity.

In this post, we’ll demonstrate how you can manage processes remotely, inside a live user session, by performing tasks that are otherwise inaccessible if not on the user machines.

When Do You Need to Interact with Live User Sessions?

Consider the following scenario: a user contacts you with a printing issue. To start, you need to see which printers are mapped for that particular user session. In this specific case, the control panel with the relevant information is contained in a restricted environment that the user is unable to access. If you were to log on to the user machine with your administrative account, you wouldn’t see the printers that are mapped to the user, only those that are mapped to you. Additionally, applications are sometimes published to all users specifically for troubleshooting, which, as seen from the printer’s control panel, can be quite excessive.

How to Interact with Live User Sessions

Within the ControlUp console, you can easily locate a user session with the ‘Sessions’ view and the search box. Once located, double- click the user session to view all of the processes that are running:

You can perform actions by right-clicking the user session. For the scenario mentioned above, click ‘Start Process in Session’:

Then run the command, ‘control printers’ to display the printers in the user session.

The video below demonstrates the ability to start (and end) any process in a user session:

Quite often, like in the scenario above, you start a specific program only to close it a few seconds later. Therefore, establishing a remote assistance connection would be complete overkill, and should be avoided. With ControlUp, you can solve issues from working within user environments, which is efficient, non-disruptive, and eliminates the need to recreate a similar environment.

Hang out with us some more and be sure to read the next article in the series that will show you how to compare and enforce Windows registry configurations on dozens of computers. We welcome you to learn more about ControlUp and how its many features can help you provide a superior end-user experience with the metrics you need to make stellar decisions. You can catch them on video too.