Stall The Ball

No good ones for ages and then three come at once.

Hot on the heels of the Meebo widget I strike across a post from Saumil.

In it he references two tools, the first TeamViewer Remote Desktop Sharing is like remote desktop sharing on steroids, but its not cheap if you want more than the free version has to offer.

The second one is a smasher. Vyew.com. An online meeting / collaboration / whiteboard / remote desktop sharing tool for the masses.

Follow up:

A quick Google revealed that Tom Raftery has found it as well. And he seems to be pleased with the result.

I’ve been playing with it this morning. Collaborating with a fellow techie in Australia and although we could use in-house livemeeting from Microsoft we persevered with Vyew. The crux came after an hour or so. We realised we had to get someone else in on the meeting. Gave him a bell, he went to Vyew’s website joined the meeting and off we went. That simple, that easy. No plugins, downloads updates.

Thats the real beauty of this app. No fuss, no muss, just does what it's supposed to do freely, easily and most of all with very little IT savy required.

But where I was completely gob smacked was when I tried the desktop sharing side.

For anyone trying to remotely help a user just create a meeting, give them the details, wait until they login and get them to click the share desktop icon.

From the Vyew.com website

How to Share your Desktop
Join your Vyew Meeting
Click NEW PAGE > LIVE DESKTOP SHARING
Click START SHARING

A couple of caveats to bear in mind. It is very fussy about disconnections and time outs. Trying to use this on dial up would, at a guess, be a painful experience.

On one occasion it crashed my browser resulting in all open browsers being closed. Otherwise it ran flawlessly. If Guy Kawasaki reckons it’s a good bet, who am I to disagree.

Definitely one to be bolted onto my desktop.