The only way your own desktop can be more useful is if you can share it with others. Remote desktop sharing software allows you to conduct online web conferences, share PowerPoint presentations, provide remote assistance and collaborate on projects with anyone with an Internet connection. Two of the leading names in free remote desktop sharing software are Vyew and Join.Me. This review will take a look at the strengths and weaknesses of both.

Ease of Use – Winner: Join.Me

Perhaps the hardest part of conducting an online meeting or web conference is getting all of the participants on the same page. Due to varying levels of tech savviness, many web conferences are delayed as organizers have to chase down wayward participants and coach them through the joining process. Luckily, with both Join.Me and Vyew, this is mostly a non-issue. Joining a Join.Me web conference is as simple as clicking a shareable link generated by the web conference host. Join.Me is all flash based, so users don’t need to install any applications, add-ons or plugins. The entire conference runs right in the browser.

Vyew is much the same. Vyew users create a room and then invite users to join. Unregistered users can view the room, but to participate fully they’ll have to register. Because of this extra step, Join.Me wins the ease of use category.

Screen Sharing and Collaboration – Winner: Vyew

Join.Me is an amazing remote assistance tool. At any point in the web conference, you can hand control over to a remote user, allowing them to control the mouse and keyboard of the host machine. Quick and simple.

Vyew’s collaboration is a bit more full-featured, however. Not only can Vyew members share control of slide shows, they can also annotate slides, add real time comments and make notes and markings on the presentation. You can even share web cam video for each user, which is a nice touch of personalization.

File Sharing – Winner: Tie

Join.Me allows you to send files to individual users by clicking on their name and browsing to the file. From there, they can accept it or decline it. If you want to share a file with all participants, you can send it to the host and have them pull it up on their screen.

Vyew is a bit different. With Vyew, files are uploaded directly to the room. This makes the immediately accessible to all participants. However, the range of file types are somewhat limited.

Scheduling – Winner: Vyew

Join.Me and Vyew both let you schedule future meetings, recurring meetings and events and presentations. But this feature is only available for paid users of Join.Me. For this reason, Vyew wins this category.

Overall

In the end, both Vyew and Join.Me are excellent desktop sharing applications that you can use for free. This review only scratched the surface of Vyew’s full capabilities, however. Vyew is a full-featured collaboration application that lets you do more than simply share your screen. But if all you want to do is share a PowerPoint presentation, Join.Me may be a quick and easy solution that works better for you. Check them both out and try for yourself.

Visit http://join.me to try Join.Me.

Visit the Google Chrome Web Store to install Vyew.