The next best thing to working in the same room
Jahanzeb Sherwani HUNTER
Today, we’re launching the following two features in Slack:
1) Screenhero-style screen sharing: multi-mouse screen sharing where everyone can click and type. Great for pair programming, and any task where you and your coworker(s) need to feel like they’re in the same room.
2) Drawing: if you don’t want to give everyone in your screen share the ability to control your screen, you can allow them to use their mouse to draw on your screen. It’s a simple visual communication tool that we’ve found is also fun to use.
These features are available immediately. Just make sure you’re on a paid plan, using the latest version of Slack’s Windows desktop app or the direct download version of Slack’s Mac desktop app. Try it out and tell us what you think — we love feedback! Folks from the team will be around here to answer questions.
Finally, since we’ve rolled its features into Slack, we’re also announcing that the standalone Screenhero app will be closing on December 1st, 2017. While we’ll miss the standalone app, we’re proud of the integrated experience we’ve built in Slack, and are excited to improve Slack calls in a number of directions in the coming months and years!
Working with teammates in Slack, wherever they are, started with messaging. Then came voice and video calls, followed by screen sharing. And now, screen sharing from a Slack call has gone interactive: You can invite others to write, code, design — or whatever working together means to you — all directly from your shared screen.
Invite others on the call to contribute
To begin, simply share your screen from a Slack call, and hit the “share control of your screen” button. Each participant will then receive their own cursor, along with the ability to type, edit, scroll, and click through the contents of the shared screen.
Viewers on the call can direct attention to specific parts of the screen
How organizations are using it
Over the past months, customers helping beta test this feature have already found plenty of ways to use it. Some organizations share control of their screen for step-by-step IT troubleshooting, while others use it for pair programming. Zapier, a software company with a fully distributed workforce, relies on interactive screen sharing so that two or more individuals can work together triaging bugs and responding to customer tickets.
As always, native calls are only one way to work face-to-face or voice-to-voice in Slack — our many third-party calling integrations such as Zoom, Blue Jeans, Google Hangouts and others allow your team to choose what works best for you to move projects forward with teammates in faraway places.
To share control of your screen, you’ll need to be on a paid plan running the latest Windows desktop app or the direct download version of the Mac desktop app. This feature, and the other calling features in Slack, have been made possible by the small but mighty Screenhero team. If you’ve been using Screenhero, you can find out more details about the plan to wind it down on the Screenhero blog.
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