Users will now see the main Help And Support Center screen, shown in Figure A. As you can see, the two primary methods of requesting remote assistance are via an instant message or e-mail. If users want to send an e-mail-based invitation, they simply enter the e-mail address of the person to whom they want to send the invitation and then click the Invite This Person link. The users' Outlook or Outlook Express address book is also available through this screen. To use Windows Messenger, users first must be logged on to a Windows Messenger service, which they can do directly from this dialog box by clicking the Sign In button under the Windows Messenger section, shown in Figure A. Once logged in to Windows Messenger, users click Tools | Ask for Remote Assistance and then choose the e-mail address of the contact they want to ask for help.

Figure A

The Help and Support screen requests remote assistance.

The other available option is to save the invitation as a file by selecting the corresponding link at the bottom of the Help And Support Center screen. Users are then presented with the Remote Assistance -- Save Invitation wizard, where they must enter their name and chose an expiration time for the invitation. Setting an expiration time promotes security by ensuring that an open invitation isn't hanging around indefinitely. The default expiration time is one hour. Finally, users have the option of associating a password with the invitation to prevent it from being used by anyone other than the intended recipient. If users attach a password, they must tell the recipient the password. Once a password in entered, users can easily save the file to the desktop, My Documents Folder, a network share, or any other location. By default, all Remote Assistance invitations are named RAInvitation.mscrincident. While the file name doesn't affect the Remote Assistance process, users won't be able to save multiple invitations with the same name to the same location. Figure B shows you an example of the text within an invitation file.

Figure B

A saved invitation file.

Once the file is saved, users can transmit the file to the help desk in a variety of ways, including e-mail or a watched network folder.