Effective collaboration requires getting everyone’s ideas and input, and doing it in a way that is clear, easy to follow, and produces usable results. With Microsoft SharedView, it’s never been easier to put your heads together and see results instantly:

Using SharedView, you (or anyone else in the session) can share your Desktop or an application.
 
The sharer has initial control of a shared application or desktop, but any session participant can request control at any time so everyone can actively contribute. The sharer can immediately take control back by simply clicking the mouse or pressing a key on the keyboard.

Not in control? Relax! Even if you are not in control, you still have a voice. Each participant has a personalized pointer to use to point out specific items or highlight an area--perfect for keeping everyone involved and making sure details aren’t missed.

You want to track results and contributions? Easy! When working in a Word document with SharedView tracked changes, each change is clearly marked and identified with the name and a custom color of the user making the change.

Here is yet another cool feature - any participant can provide handouts that other participants can download. No email required. Great, isn't it?

Wired Magazine editor, Chris Anderson, recently published an article on his blog, The Long Tail, suggesting that, much as spare CPU cycles drive projects like SETI, human “spare cycle” are powering the open source movement and Web 2.0. It’s a really nice metaphor, the problem is, for large open source projects anyway, it isn’t true.

While Anderson’s theory may explain smaller open source projects and web 2.0 sites like Flickr, big open source projects, like the Linux kernal, are built not by the mythical open source volunteer, but by paid programmers working for large corporations.

Jonathan Corbet of LWN.net released a study a couple of months ago that pegged corporate contributions to the Linux kernal at 65 percent. The breakdown of corporations involved included Red Hat with far and away the most contributions, along with IBM, Novell, the Linux Foundation (which employs Torvalds), Intel, and Oracle.

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The salient point isn’t that open source is somehow tainted by corporate involvement, but rather that open source is ultimately a capitalist venture like any other software.
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