It's been a while since I updated my toolbox so I thought I'd do a little post about my most recent addition: Microsoft SharedView.

What is SharedView? As the name implies it's a way of sharing what you see on your computer with others remotely. I've had to muck around with LiveMeeting a lot lately and boy is that a piece of work in the sense of me not being able to get anything done within a reasonable amount of time. Setting up a shared desktop experience with that stuff is like swimming in molasses: A lot of effort and very little reward. You have to pay to use it too.

Contrast this experience with SharedView where you're up and running in a matter of a couple of minutes. Did I mention that's completely free to use? To test out SharedView I tried it out with a partner abroad. I hadn't mentioned anything about it before the meeting but we literally had the program up and running within two minutes sharing the presentation that I needed him to see. Cool stuff! The experience has that Apple-feel to it: I got the job done, nothing more, nothing less.

SharedView allows you to share a single program window or the entire desktop and you can hand over control of the window to any participant in your current session. Setting up a new session is a simple matter of you logging in with your Live ID and clicking "Start new session" which will provide you with a link you can send to the participants of the meeting. That's it.

I definitely see this little gem coming in handy with customer meetings where we need to do sprint demos but can't come on site to do so. With a new delivery going down each month having the entire dev team on site is somewhat of a drain on the customer.

Download Microsoft SharedView