I’m in love with Acrobat.com.
We’re heavy in another development phase of our social networking tool, which means lots of iterating through screens and lots of back and forth with the team. Since I’m in Chicago and everyone else is in New York, we needed an easy way to share screens. Historically we’ve used between 5-10 comps per screen (showing each state) and a corresponding epic length email that I have to then explain again in its entirety. We could have used Webex or something similar, but the clunkiness of it made it more trouble than it was worth.
And then came acrobat.com and it’s beautiful ConnectNow tool. It’s painless to share my screen with anyone – all I need is a free acrobat.com account. My audience just needs to point to my custom URL in their browser – nothing to sign up for, nothing to install (other than Flash 9) – it’s fast, has minimal lag and is simple enough for anyone to use. It even comes with a conference number for private, instantaneous conference calls (also free.)
We’ve been using it for about three weeks now with increased regularity (four such meetings took place yesterday.) When it takes literally 15 seconds to set up a meeting and get everyone in the room, the inertia of collaborating more closely starts to evaporate.
Very strongly recommended for anyone who works with distributed teams. I’m amazed they aren’t marketing the hell out of this thing – it absolutely blows WebEx and friends out of the water.
