SharedView 1.0 has been out now for a few weeks, and based on blog feedback, it's been very well received. Here's a few quotes:
"Nothing has come close to the ease of Microsoft SharedView."
"Simplifying a collaboration interface so it is dead simple for a non-technical person is a major upgrade."
"Every once in a while I am blown away by something. Not because it is the latest and greatest, but because it does what it does in such a simple and easy to use way… this is one of those things."
Many of the new SharedView users are discovering it through Microsoft Office Live Workspace, on the Share menu - just choose "Share Screen" from the menu, and SharedView will launch and start sharing your screen automatically. If you don't have SharedView installed yet, you'll be provided a link to install it. Because Office Live Workspace is a great place to store and share documents, you can also use it as a place to meet up with coworkers to share in real time with SharedView to get feedback on a proposal in Word, put some polish on a presentation in PowerPoint, or get some updated numbers for a spreadsheet in Excel. It will share any application though, or your entire desktop. The person you're sharing with can even paste in data in remotely from their machine if you give them control of your mouse and keyboard for a bit using SharedView.
All in all, we're proud of the quality and robustness of the release, and we hope you enjoy using SharedView. Keep an eye out for releases in French, Spanish, German, and Japanese in the coming months.
thanks
Cameron
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
Being the first entry, I thought I'd start off with telling you what you can expect from this space:
- Updates on the SharedView product
- Requests for ideas and feedback on current features and future plans
- Posts from various members of the team on interesting topics
- Discussions on the software design and development process
- Interesting scenarios for using web collab - Our thoughts and yours on what works and what doesn't
- Your topics - suggest something in a comment and we'll consider it!
We've also recently announced our Beta2 release. The team is very proud of the work that has gone into the release, and we're already quite busy on version 1.0.
You can download and try it today at: http://www.sharedview.com
So what the heck is SharedView, anyways? In a nutshell, it's a fast, easy, and free way to work with a few co-workers or friends on anything on your computer. Often this will be a document, but it can also be photos, web pages, a presentation, driving through a meeting agenda, or working on the computer itself (fixing a friend or relative's computer without having to travel to do it).
Why free, you may ask? We want people to think about new ways to work with each other, and to do that, we're removing the barriers:
- Zero cost
- Easy to install
- Always works - if you can browse the internet, you can use SharedView
- Simple to host a session - sign in with an existing Hotmail/Passport/Windows Live ID, or get one easily
- Simple to join - sign in or use a password provided by the session host
- Share your screen or send around a document with a few clicks
- Share control - let others take control of your mouse & keyboard with a click or two
- Get the heck out of the way - SharedView is a thin strip at the top of the screen, and you can minimize it if you wish. One of our tenet's is: "Your content is king" so we've worked hard to take up as little screen space as we can, while still providing a useful set of tools to control the experience.
OK, enough on the sell job, especially since I'm not even in marketing. Just try it out at your next meeting - don't bother with the projector - just share out your screen instead. It'll change the way you work...
