We recently started an article series on tools that we love using in our everyday work with Responster. What’s great with these tools is that they ultimately make Responster a better product. We started off by telling you about Olark, which is great for communicating with visitors and users on our website. Today we continue this article series with a tool that my colleague Hjalmar mentioned in one of his earlier post. The tool I’m talking about is Screenleap.
For us Screenleap has helped us a lot in our sales and demoing of Responster since it enables us to show the product to people remotely. Here’s what makes Screenleap great, and perhaps useful for your company as well.
Inviting Others to view Your Screen
Screenleap is an online based software enabling you to share your screen with anyone, either publicly or privately. It takes literally less than 5 minutes to get you up and running. Even better is that the viewer doesn’t have to install any software to participate in your sharing session. The only thing you’ll have to do is to share a link or private sharing code with the viewer.
Using Screenleap’s free account you can share your screen one hour per day with up to 8 people at the same time. This means that besides sharing your screen with a single viewer you can also host seminars with multiple people at the same time.
Here’s how you setup Screenleap for public broadcasting and private screen sharing.
Broadcast
When you log in to your Screenleap account you get the options to either share your screen publicly or privately. Choosing the public option gives you a web link that you anyone can access in order to view your screen. The web link you’ll use looks like in the picture below, where the last part of the link is your account name.
What’s great with the public sharing option is that you can have the web link permanently presented on your website. By doing so, you can host webinars or scheduled demo sessions that your website visitors and users participate in by clicking on the link.
Share
The other option is to share your screen privately using a unique web link. This is useful when you don’t want any unauthorized person to participate in your screen sharing session. When you launch a private session you get a web link as shown below. You also get the alternative to direct your viewer to Screenleap’s website where he or she can input a code to access your screen sharing session.
We’ve used this option when demoing Responster for a prospect, since we then know that only he or she gets access to the screen-sharing session.
Responster Screen Sharing Setup
When we use Screenleap to demo Responster we need to be able to show two things to the viewer: the website and the iOS app. This way we can give the viewer an introduction to Responster’s full functionality. We can show everything from data collection using an iPad/web survey, to survey creation and management on the website.
As the Apple freaks we are (yeah we love iPads not only because they’re great for data collection) we’re really glad that desktop screen recording from an iOS device was introduced with OS X Yosemite. This means that we can pop in an iPad into a computer and start recording the iPad screen from the computer screen. All this is then visible to the viewer thanks to Screenleap. If you want to learn more, there’s a nifty guide on how to record your iOS screen in OS X Yosemite right here.
Here’s how a typical demo setup of Responster looks like when we use Screenleap. The green rectangle is the area that is recorded, in this case the website. To the right is the mirrored iPad screen showing an example survey used to collect patient feedback.
To summarize how much we like Screenleap, here are the five things we can’t live without:
- Screenleap setup is done in no-time. You’re ready to start sharing your screen in less than 5 minutes.
- There’s no hustle from the viewer’s side. Your prospect easily participates in a private screen sharing without having to install any software.
- Streaming quality is excellent! We’ve demoed Responster for people found outside of Sweden and the video quality has never been bad.
- The free account gets you far. One streaming hour a day with up to 8 viewers is enough to start with.
- Full control of the screen recording area. If you have parts of the screen that you don’t want your viewer to see you can choose to exclude it.
If you’re in need of a screen-sharing tool that not only is free, but also great, then you should check out Screenleap. Head over to Screenleap’s website to start sharing your screen today. And if you’re curious about Responster having seen a short glimpse of it in the picture above, you should get yourself a free account right here.
Take care,
Ludvig