Quick Assist – The Overlooked Remote Assistant

Troubleshooting and assisting remote computer users has always been a challenge. For years, with earlier Windows versions, we had Remote Assistance. But many organizations never gave it much attention, and instead skipped right over it to third-party products like TeamViewer, LogMeIn, <fill-in-name>VNC, and others. Many are of them are fine and do a great job. Many of them also impose feature limits unless you pay for the “professional”, “enterprise” or “premium” edition, etc.

Since Windows 10 1709, Microsoft added another alternative to Remote Assistance, and I’m surprised how many sysadmins have never heard of it.

It’s called Quick Assist.

This came up during a call with a customer who uses Intune and they asked about the TeamViewer feature. Like other customers I’ve spoken with, they had the impression that there’s really no other alternative. But there is (are), and even if you opt out of using Quick Assist, there are other free tools available which may do what you need. This jaw-jacking mind spewage however is focused on Quick Assist, so let’s get in and go for a ride.

Quick Assist is not a “headless”, or unattended, remote connection solution. It requires the end user to be at their computer and logged on. It’s also fairly simple to use, and only requires the following conditions in order to use it:

• Both the end user and the IT technician need machines with an Internet connection.
• The end user needs to be present (and logged on) to the target computer.

Connecting

The process goes like this:

1. The technician opens Quick Assist (Win key + “Quick” and select the app)
2. Technician clicks “Assist another person”
3. Technician provides credentials to authenticate to the organization
4. Technician provides the one-time access code to the user: By voice (over the phone), by email, Twitter DM, Facebook Messenger, SMS text, carrier pidgeon, or crackheads on stolen bicycles who need to earn some extra cash.
5. The end user enters the one-time access code, and clicks “Share Screen”
6. The Technician is prompted to choose either “View Screen” or “Take Full Control”
7. The end user reads the long, boring warning message that the remote user could be ISIS or Putin, and then clicks “Allow” to grant the Technician permissions, with finger’s crossed and eyes closed.
8. The Screen Sharing session begins.
9. The Technician begins extracting personal information from the end user computer, assumes their identity and drains their bank accounts within 10 minutes, while calmly repeating “almost done, just a few more clicks“. Just kidding. We’re all honest here, right? See? This is why I don’t work at crisis call centers.

From here, the Technician can perform any task they would if logged onto the physical workstation (or virtual machine). Remember when Remote Assistance would blank-out the Technician screen if a UAC prompt was triggered on the end user desktop? Not with Quick Assist.

That’s right, the Technician is free to roam around and deploy whatever diabolically-destructive dastardly deviations they desire, and blame it all on the poor end user. That is, of course, unless the end user agrees to whatever terms the Technician demands of them.

Oh wait, that’s the wrong movie plot. Uhhh. I mean, from here, the Technician can troubleshoot anything related to Windows, applications, management tools, like MECM or Intune, Group Policy, or good old fashioned disk space vaporization from truckloads of vacation photos and video clips. But let’s see some juicy screen shots…

Oooh! Screen shots (high tech)

Step 1 – Technician Desktop

Step 2 – Technician Desktop

Step 3 – Technician Desktop

Step 4 – Technician Desktop (note the countdown timer)

Step 5 – End User Desktop

Step 6 – End User Desktop

Step 7 – Technician Desktop

Step 8 – End User Desktop (panel minimizes to top of screen)

Step 9 – Technician Desktop

The menu bar links are normally shown as icons without labels, unless you click the “. . .” link to the far-right (Details). This will toggle the text labels on and off. “Details” seems weird. Why not “Show Labels” like 99.999999999% of other apps do? Because…

From left to right:

• Select Monitor – For toggling between multiple remote monitors (end user machine)
• Annotate – This is supposed to allow the Technician to “draw” on the end user’s desktop to help guide them where to look or click on things. However, in my tests it was hit or miss (mostly miss). Your mileage may vary.
• Actual Size – Zoom the Technician display to 100% , which may cut-off and add scroll bars to the window frame
• Toggle Instruction Channel – Opens the super-cheap chat tool (see rant below)
• Restart – Restart the remote (end user) computer
• Task Manager – Opens the Windows Task Manager on the remote computer
• Pause – Pauses the Technician screen session, blanks it out (black) with a message “You have paused screen sharing” / also Toggles “Pause” to “Resume”
• End – Ends the screen sharing session
• Details – Toggles the menu bar labels on or off

Technical Stuff

• While Quick Assist is active, the application process will show as “quickassist.exe”, running from %windir%\system32.
• You can effectively block Quick Assist using Group Policy or 3rd Party products using the filename and path. But why would you want to?

Some Caveats

• Quick Assist won’t help you if the remote machine isn’t turned on, not connected to the Internet (or your WAN or LAN), or when the remote machine won’t boot at all, for whatever reason, like being left in the trunk of a car or on the driveway in the rain.
• The end user may not see chat messages sent by the Technician via the “Toggle Instruction Channel” feature, because the little clipboard icon on the end user machine will only show a red dot. The minimized panel also doesn’t stay on “top” (z-order) of other application windows, so the end user may need some coaching to find it.
• The “Toggle Instruction Channel” is some sort of weird, bastardized, Tide pod ingesting, hallucinogenic imploded derivative of a chat tool, but without any chat history. So each message is the only one visible, on either end. Which is weird. I mean, this is 2020, and attorneys still play golf with money billed from customers who couldn’t find records of conversations to prove their actions in court, which is kind of why chat history is important. But whatever.
• The Task Manager button is nice, but why not provide a CTRL+ALT+DEL button, or buttons for Computer Management, Regedit and Explorer?
• It’s obvious, to me anyway, that Microsoft could easily bundle a really robust remote troubleshooting tool into Windows, but probably doesn’t want to start a bar room fight with partners. Not yet anyway.

What’s really amazing is that I could only find five (5) things to bitch about regarding Quick Assist. I’m sure there’s more, but the bullets above are enough for me. Aside from that stupid rant above, the rest of Quick Assist is pretty cool, and it could quite possibly bail your ass out in a pinch.

Cheers!