Ahhh, how time flies. It was just about two years ago that my fellow bibliobloggers and I were agog over the co-browsing potential shown by a product called Jybe. Just visited their website and it’s all gone – hope the developers have moved on to other good things – they seemed like good guys.
Anyhoo, Kolabora.com has a posting today bringing us up to speed on the latest co-browsing options. Most of them do cost money, but there were a couple that appear to be free, including a lite version (vRoom) of Elluminate, which we use here to great effect at the U of C. There’s a full review of vRoom here, and while the review doesn’t read as very positive, my personal experience with Elluminate leads me to recommend that, if you’re looking for a tool that will allow you to co-browse websites with a small number (1-3) of students AND offer very good Voice over IP quality, you should take a good look at this free tool.
And since I’ve put the cart first, co-browsing is the ability to share your web browser (and often any other application on your desktop) with someone in a remote location. Need to walk a student through a tricky database search? Almost impossible on the phone, but dead simple if you’re both seeing the same screen.
I use Elluminate (full version) to teach to classes of students, but have fallen back on Skype and Unyte for my on-the-fly co-browsing needs. One of the nicer things about vRoom though, is that it’s completely web-based and thus platform independent.
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One response to “Co-Browsing Tools And Technology: A Mini-Guide”
LiveLOOK http://www.livelook.net is a next-generation co-browsing and screen sharing technology. LiveLOOk establishes an instant visual link between Agents and Customers. LiveLOOK button gets added to your website, once an online visitor clicks the button, an instant visual link with Agent is established.
LiveLOOK’s technology in unprecedented in the market for the following reasons:
* No dowlaods of software required for either Agents on Consumers
* Universal – works on Windows, Mac and Linux with any browser
* Instant – a single click on a button is all that is required to establish a visual link.
* Shares the entire desktop — not only webpages.