SharedView Update (and a little bit about how we work)
The team is working hard on the 1.0 release of SharedView - driving down the bug counts and driving up the quality. Just a handful of bugs remain before we fully stabilize and enter into our localization (4 additional languages) and final test passes. Keep an eye out for an update in Q1 of the new year.
Some great news is that advertisements in the product are turned off until some time in January as a trial to collect feedback - with no ads, starting and joining/starting sessions super fast, and it allows people in the session to view shared content without the tower ad, often eliminating scaled-down views of the content.
We've also kicked off our planning efforts for the next release of SharedView. This started with a very interesting and cool "idea week" a couple of weeks ago, where the entire team took a week to split into small teams to brainstorm and create prototypes for new and sometimes far-reaching ideas to take SharedView to the next level. You may be asking what exactly do I mean by "next level." Without giving away some of the great ideas, many of the teams looked at novel ways of using our core technologies (screen sharing, connectivity, reliably and quickly sending data) to apply to new usage scenarios and to radically improving the performance of sharing. It was a very energizing and productive exercise for the entire team.
As part of the development process, we're also cataloging the backlog of potential scenarios and features for the next release, and weighting them with engineering costs, and customer and competitive benefit. This will allow us to cut down to the best set of features that give our customers compelling reasons to use SharedView on a regular basis. Once we've narrowed down the list to fit within schedule constraints, we'll do a modified version of BDUF (Big Design Up Front, see Wikipedia for articles on the topic) to make sure we've uncovered any large unknowns in the design, followed by feature crews and implementation sprints in the agile development model (see Wikipedia for details on agile and scrum).
In general, team members here appreciate using agile development as it encourages frequent communication, promotes accountability, and empowers individuals to make decisions. We've used it a few times now, and continue to tweak it based on team wide retrospectives of what went well and what needs improvement. Overall, the team is very open to trying new ways of working and adapting them to suit our specific needs.
That's it for now - if you have any comments or feedback on the product, feel free to drop me a note here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharedviewteamblog/contact.aspx
