Copilot OneClick Ships!

How it started

Six weeks ago, I passed along Seth Godin's Like your hair is on fire post to the rest of the Copilot team. We had been kicking around this idea of getting a new product out there to make it even easier for people who run help desks, or help their mom every weekend, to use Copilot. It was a huge chunk of new functionality.

• It had to be installed to make it work.
• It would need to talk to computers in our data center all the time so we could know if it was online.
• It would require a whole bunch of new UI on the website to create, control and organize the computers.

The list of stuff that needed doing was daunting, but as we thought about it, it became clear that we didn't need to do everything we had envisioned right from launch. For example, we didn't have to have a ghost mode that would allow system administrators to put OneClick into an image from day one. First, based on talking to our customers, we weren't sure that enough users wanted the feature. Second, and perhaps most importantly, it added complexity to the use of the product for people who might not even need the feature.

With some fastidious feature trimming, we got down to something that could be feature complete in just a few weeks. After six weeks of effort, we have a brand-new shipping Fog Creek Copilot product. That means:

• all-new clients (the part that runs on your computer)
• all-new reflector (the part that runs in our data center)
• all-new section on the website to control your OneClick computers

All of that in just six weeks time to give us Fog Creek Copilot OneClick.

What is OneClick?

Copilot OneClick gets installed on the computers of the people that you help most frequently and allows you to support them with a single click from the website once OneClick is set up. This streamlines the process of helping the same people over and over again (which a lot of our customers were doing) by allowing them to avoid the trip back to the website to create a new invitation or download the host. It is a feature for our subscribers as long as they have one of our unlimited plans. You can install Fog Creek Copilot OneClick on as many computers as you want for only $39.95 per month. If you want to try it out, sign up for a free trial.

It was a singularly spectacular experience working on this product with Ben and Tyler (the two studs from the Aardvark'd movie) and Alison (our absolutely awesome QA analyst). We worked hard, learned a ton, and managed to have fun while doing it.

We will be sharing the lessons that we learned along the way right here, so check back over the next week or so if you are interested.

What's Next?

Rock Band, and lots of it! Then we have a few things that we are thinking about, but it would be great if you would let us know what you want to see in the product by giving us feedback.

Comments

[Stefan Rusek]

Congratulations guys! That sounds great!

[steven]

any plan to support Linux?

[Sam]

The description of OneClick (and how it is billed) are a bit confusing to me.

We got a small software company and use copilot to support our customers. Right now we download helper and helpee program, and ship it to our client, so we already got One-Click-Support for our customers.

So with the new OneClick, our customers would install this OneClick on every computer which might need support (about 500 computers) instead of just running the helpee exe from our program?

And for this extra work we'd need to pay $39,95 per helper computer in our company? (for 4 seats this would be $160 instead of the $100 for the 2000 minute plan we get along with right now).

Did I understand this right (took me some time to compile this information, from the data on the copilot site at first I thought I would need to pay $19.95 for every computer we Install OneClick to: 500 computers would have been $10,000 that way - you really should clarify the main information there).

[Jason Rosoff]

Hi Sam,

OneClick is designed to make Copilot invisible in the support process. You install it once and then the person you are helping never has to do anything on the their end to receive support from you via Copilot ever again. In addition, you don't have to think in terms of invitation codes and executables that you have saved, but instead you just find the name of the person or computer that you are trying to support. We wanted to make it possible for you to focus on supporting people instead of the means by which you were going to support them.

A few things worth mentioning here:

1. Most people aren't currently using Copilot the way you are. In most cases, emailing an executable around simply isn't an option. If I understand your explanation correctly, this means more than a single step on both sides of the connection, but perhaps I have misunderstood.

2. Even if you save the executables, you add the additional burden of having to be aware of where those executables were saved and ensuring that the helpee is using the right one (I tried this with my parents and almost every time we wound up having to create a new invitation because they lost the old executable).

3. Use is completely UNLIMITED with the new plan, and you get both the classic ad-hoc support and the ability to install OneClick on any number of computers. Install where you want, or use the classic connection with no overages, ever.

4. It is great to hear that Copilot is serving your needs. We aren't forcing people to upgrade, and if your current plan is giving you what you want, by all means stick with it.

I hope that addresses your questions!

[Sam]

Jason,

we are not emailing copilot executables, we includes them into our automated setup. And we use a single copilot executable per client location, so only one person from the client at a time can get support.
The client does not need to copy the executable, does not need to know where it is stored, does not even has to install it on every client computer, since we use a server install.

One additional question: some of our customers use remote software in-house, too - is it possible to install OneClick two times, once for us and once for someone else?

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