The newest version of TeamViewer starts to combine both of these functions into one package. Not only is it effective, but it is also free and cross-platform, which can’t be said with most other products, especially when it comes to long distance presentations.

Installation

In order to reap the benefits, you’ll need to head over to TeamViewer’s website and download the latest version. During the installation you’ll have the option of either installing the program or simply running it. I’d recommend that you install it unless you want to use it from your flash drive. Some more information is presented next to each option.

To use the free version without restrictions, make sure that you say you’re using TeamViewer for personal / non-commercial use (but be honest if this isn’t really the case). If you chose to see advanced options, you’ll notice the first impressive feature: TeamViewer lets you create a personal VPN using the software. You can select this if you have a use for it. Once the installation completes, the setup wizard will close and TeamViewer will automatically launch.

Remote Control Features

When the TeamViewer window opens, you’ll be first placed into the “Remote Control” tab, which makes up the original functions of TeamViewer. Here you’ll get treated to the same ID and password fields that correspond to your computer, along with ID and password fields that you can enter numbers into to connect to a remote computer. You can also choose between a remote control connection and a file transfer connection, depending on what you’d like to do with the other computer.

Meetings

If you move into the second tab, labeled “Meeting“, you’ll find TeamViewer’s new features. In this tab, you can start your own instant meeting or connect to an existing meeting. If you decide to sign up for an account with TeamViewer, you’ll get a few more features, such as a list of past meetings under “My Meetings”, the ability to schedule a meeting in advance, as well as the feature to add computers and contacts to keep track of who’s online and who isn’t.

Functionality in Menus

The menus also offer some more functionality to make your remote connections, file transfers, and meetings easier. Under the Connection menu, you can invite a partner (by sending them an email that’ll help them install TeamViewer), as well as set up unattended access which lets people access the computer without you having to OK the connection.

The Extras menu lets you access program options, play recorded sessions, open log files, and more. The Help menu lets you access helpful information for and about the program. You can also check for upgrades right from the menu. The Feedback button gives you a pre-written email where you can add some information for feedback.

Conclusion

TeamViewer is a great tool to do a lot of things with other people. While remote aid, file transfers, and meetings are the intended purposes for TeamViewer, users can take the program and use it in all sorts of ways for their own benefit. However, the fact that this whole package is offered for free (for personal use) is quite amazing and should be much appreciated.

What is your favorite remote pc assistance software? After reading this article, is TeamViewer or your original choice better? Let us know in the comments!

Back in January we covered the 6 Best Free Online Meeting Tools to Collaborate With Your Team, but now I would add Agreedo as a useful tool for agenda setting, minute taking, and reporting.

Setting Up Meetings

You start off by setting up a meeting on Agreedo and sending out an invitation for team members to sign into the site to view and even provide input to the meeting agenda.

You can set up meetings as Public – which are visible to everyone – or Private where it is only visible to people listed as attendees. You can select to have minutes “moderated,” which means only the creator of the meeting can add or modify items. All other participants can only add comments.

When you send out invitations, invitees will receive an email with a calendar date attachment that can be opened in Outlook, Notes, or iCal. The online tool itself works in all major browsers.

Meeting Preparation

Agreedo offers four different agenda items: Info, Decision, Task, and Topic. These items actually help you see what is the most important information to add to the minutes of meetings. There’s typically lots of discussion and sometimes arguments about very important issues at a meeting, but in order to get things done, tasks have to be identified and assigned, and important decisions have to be made.

So before a meeting is held, it’s important to make and prioritize a list of agenda items for the meeting. If a meeting consists of the same team members then you might want to leave the minutes unmoderated so that others can add items to the minutes.

Meeting items can be moved around, but unfortunately there’s no way to assign duration times to each agenda item, though you can set up a duration for the entire meeting itself.

You can also put sub-items under each major item, and each section of items can be hidden as they are completed in the meeting.

Collaboration Features

What’s most useful about Agreedo is that agendas are posted online, which allows for collaboration. Team members can also sign into Agreedo by either registering on the site or using their Google log-in.

If you allow the minutes to be unmoderated, invited participants can modify agenda items. This is a good idea, but a more advanced process would allow for only selected invitees to modify agenda items and not every participant invited to a meeting.

If you select to have a meeting moderated, it means participants can only add comments to the agenda items. Even this type of collaboration is useful for making meetings more productive because you can actually start getting input to the meeting before the meeting is held. In addition to comments being added to meeting items, files can also be attached to agenda items. Links to online resources though will need to be posted in the comments section. There’s not a dedicated tool for URLs.

Another feature I would wish for Agreedo is that the Decision item be set up so that direct polls can be posted for say the date of an event, the amount of money to be spent for a budgeted item, and other voting decisions that need to be made.

Holding Meetings

When you hold meetings, Agreedo includes a built-in timer. If you’re holding a meeting online, participants can use a tool like WebEx to view the minutes online. Or participants can log into the minutes of the meeting and refresh the page as minutes are updated during the meeting.

Before and during the meeting, you can assign tasks and due dates to individuals in the meeting.

Post Meeting Features

What makes an online tool like Agreedo more useful than traditional methods is that all the minutes can be stored online for review, as well as printed or exported as an Excel document. You can also send a link to the minutes online. Participants can receive email reminders about the tasks they signed up for as well as view all the tasks assigned to them.

There’s also a “follow-up” meeting feature which allows you to check and carry over agenda items from the previous meeting to the next. This is a little time saver especially for people assigned to take minutes and do the follow-up.

No doubt many users of Agreedo will have various feature requests for this online site, but for now I’m just glad that it exists, for it is long overdue.

Agreedo is currently totally free with no pricing plans. Let us know what you think of this site and what you would like to see added to it.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

When I was in school (yeah you young whippersnappers I said when I was in school!) we took notes on paper with a pen. When I tried to use my laptop or Palm Vx I would get in trouble and be told to put my toys away. Nowadays these “˜toys’ are welcome in most situations.

Taking notes at a meeting with your laptop or handheld is super simple with Tomato. Yes you read that correctly, the application is called Tomato for no good reason. But Ketchup is for meetings”¦

You will need to sign up for an account to use Ketchup to take notes. To read someone else’s notes you do not need a login – they just have to share the URL with you in order to share notes online. And that eludes to Ketchup’s sharing feature which we will get to in a bit. Keep on reading. Use Ketchup is the URL to get you to the application.

After you sign up you will automatically be logged in and ready to take notes. Click on the get started button at the bottom of the Here’s how it works section.

Ah ha! We are in and ready to take notes. We will need to add a title to your project / meeting notes. Simply click the title field and fill it in. You can fill in the date and attendees as well. Click get organized when you are ready to enter your notes.

I entered January 14th 2010 at 6:12pm, and the name of the event is “test meeting” ““ I know how original! This could be a class name or specific project you are working on. Next we click on the “+” sign below the agenda to add an event.

I left the default called First Appt. Then you can click on the add note link as you see below to enter details or notes.

Go ahead, populate your notes and then get ready to share notes online with classmates or colleagues. Below you will see a checkbox to make the notes public. This is another way of saying that Ketchup will make the site live with the URL next to the checkbox.

When navigating to that URL - http://useketchup.com/meetings/0pv7Wx)L – this is what I see:

All my data but no way to edit it. Very nice indeed. Especially for those of you who have lent your notes to someone, only to discover that they dropped the class and now you are stuck without your notes for a test. Ha! Take that Sharon from my English Lit class!  I will find you some day and get my notes back!

Do you have another favorite free notetaking application where you can also share notes online? Online or off we would love to hear about it in the comments. If there are some interesting suggestions maybe it will warrant another post!

This means that if you’re going to spend a lot of time working and playing with others online, you better quickly get used to the idea that the concept of time has has much less power on the Internet. In a business office or a manufacturing facility, when there’s an important meeting at 3 p.m., everyone sets their watch and shows up right on time.

Things aren’t so straightforward on the Internet. If you set a meeting for 3 p.m., who’s 3 p.m. are you talking about – the folks in China, Germany, Japan or the United States?  When you’re an online author working for several clients, things get even more confusing with deadlines that occur all around the globe and in multiple time zones.

In order to solve that problem, I decided to download and install Qlock, an awesome world clock that provides me with a glimpse of the time zones where my clients are based, and reminds me whenever certain important deadlines are due. Using the Qlock world clock, you’ll never miss another online deadline or meeting again.

Qlock – An Awesome World Clock That You Can’t Live Without

I started using Qlock as an experiment. Before I started working for MakeUseOf, my only major client was a California based company. While it was a little annoying to constantly calculate the time zone difference so I wouldn’t miss any IM meetings, it wasn’t exactly rocket science. All I had to do was add a few hours to determine East Coast time versus West Coast time and I was good to go.

However, when I started writing for MakeUseOf, that all changed. With the chief editor based in Germany and with editors and writers scattered all across the globe from Belgium to India to the U.S. – the entire concept of teamwork is now based upon how well you understand and manage global time zones. At the beginning, when our chief editor would set a deadline of 10 p.m. the day before publication, I would consistently run right up into the deadline and once I even missed it. For a guy that prides himself in never missing a deadline, this was quite humbling.

So I hunted around for an app that could help. Just recently, Simon covered some cool alarm clocks, however those are based on your own time zone.  Tina also covered some awesome alarm clocks, but again – one time zone.  So, for those of you who lead the same multiple-timezone life that I do, I present – Qlock.

Once you download and install Qlock, you’ll instantly have desktop icons that display the current time in major cities all around the world. The default is 4 cities and the time is displayed in military time.

Changing one of the icons to another city is as easy as clicking on the city name inside the icon. If you want to add an entirely new icon, you just right-click the icon of the Earth in the taskbar and select “Create Qlock.” In this case I’m changing my New York icon over to Boston, MA because that’s the largest major city that’s closest to me. This will represent my home time zone. If you don’t want to search for your city, you can just click on the map and it’ll automatically select the city for you.

When you right click on the globe icon, in addition to “Create Qlock,” there’s also the option to sync your current time with any of the several government servers.

You can set up the clock to sync with the server using any interval you like, or you can leave it in manual.  Once you sync your time with the server, you can rest assured that you have the most accurate time possible – now you have no excuse for being late for the Skype meeting!

Customizing The Qlock Display

My favorite feature of this awesome Qlock world clock is the fact that you can easily place each individual time zone clock however you like on your desktop. They don’t intrude into your workspace, but they’re instantly available if you click on the globe icon in the taskbar.

In my case I’ve added a California zone for my CA client. An England time zone for my buddy in the UK. My home time zone of Boston, and the German time zone for MakeUseOf. I like having all of my zones displayed together near my Vista Sidebar, so here I’ve stacked them up and there they’ll stay.

While this is cool enough – Qlock also offers a very handy alarm clock system which you can set for each individual time zone on your desktop. To set the alarm you just double-click where it says “No Alarm.” Once you do, the alarm clock screen for that time zone appears.

As you can see here, you can set up an individual alarm, or you can have it alarm on a certain day of the week. It’ll issue an alert sound, but you can also type in pop-up text as well. For each time zone you can set up to five independent alarms.

As you can see under the German time zone, your alarm date will countdown, so you can see how much time you have left to complete that article, or until the meeting. If you don’t like the current time display, you can change it by simply clicking on the time. I didn’t really want military time, so I changed them all to standard time with the “am/pm” display.

I find that in this world of  international friendships and global online partnerships, the ticket to success is understanding where and when your colleagues and friends are so that you can catch them when they’re not only awake, but also the most productive. By downloading Qlock, you’ll be able to overcome the time-zone confusion and take control of your global online activities and work.

Do you do a lot of online work or play that crosses many time zones? Do you know of other tools that can help overcome time zone confusion? Share your insights in the comments section below.

Up until now I have sent out meeting invitations via email for a date and time that I wanted to meet on. Then the responders would send me back comments on whether it was good for them or not.  If it wasn’t, and they were crucial to the meeting, we would re-schedule. But how about a meeting scheduler you can use before the meeting?

Wouldn’t it be nice to send out a link to your attendees where they could click on several possibilities for the meeting? You can then use the results to gather when it would be best to have the meeting. Have you used the new cover sheets on the TPS reports? No you haven’t? Well then we will need to have a meeting about that this weekend.

Let’s use the meeting scheduler When is Good to schedule it.  You do not need to sign up or pay for an account to use the functionality we will talk about in this article.

The features the free basic account has are shown below. This is really all we need to get the job done. But if you want to brand it or get a few simple options in there then by all means pay for a account. But as I said before, we are using this on the free account without signing up.

I clicked on pricing and then created an event under the Basic heading. Then you are off to create your event. You will see a calendar and a button to create an event. First you will need to name your event and hit that button.

I named my event Test Event 1 and hit the create event button to continue on to selecting dates and times that are good for me.

Then you will see a message that instructs you to choose times and dates for your events. These will be the tentative times shown to the respondents of your email.

I notched off Saturday October 31st (Halloween!) at 2pm and Sunday November 1st at 1pm, 2pm and 3pm. These will be the only choices the users can choose between to keep things simple.

Once you have completed everything, you will get a super secret code. This code will enable your non-registered users to see the results of your survey. You can see mine below and actually use it to retrieve my results.

Now you are ready to compose an email, shoot out so instant messages or even send out a snail mail mailer. You will be given the link to send out, the link to go to where you will be able to review the responses from your survey. If you actually want to see how the user will see it, follow this link and feel free to make a selection or two and submit it.

You can also choose if you want the meeting scheduler to email you the responses as they come in:

You can go and view the results of my survey here.

This is the page that the user will see to make their choices:

To check the results of your survey, hit the enter results code link on the home page. This is the screen where you can enter your results code:

And now the moment you have all been waiting for”¦.the results!

This is the screen you should hope to see. You will get this when one item matches across all the respondents. If not you will see something (more likely) like this:

Good luck on your meeting! Do you use a better free meeting scheduler? We would love to hear about it in the comments!

When Is Good

And then there’s always that poor fellow, who has to communicate back and forth with everyone to find the best solution.

If you’re sick of it, try the following tool.

Doodle is a webtool through which you can make an online poll to schedule an event or make a choice. Registration is optional and creating the polls couldn’t be any more simple.

This is where you start. Select the type of poll you want to launch. You can choose between “schedule an event” or “make a choice”, i.e. event or choice poll.

The first step if you want to make an online poll for either poll type is the same: you set a title, add an optional description, and provide your name and eMail address.

The next step in scheduling an event is selecting the possible dates.

Following the dates, you can add available times and set further options.

Doodle supports time zones; options offer “yes-no-ifneedbe” style polls, which allow the voter to weigh their selection; the poll can be hidden, so that only the creator can see the answers; also the number of OKs (votes) per participant can be limited.

Setting up a choice poll is even more simple and gives you the same options described above.

A poll goes live once you hit the Finish button. You will be provided with the participation link, which you can send to the target crowd. Using the administration link, you can edit or delete the poll.

Below is an example of a running choice poll. As you can see, Doodle automatically does all the counting for you.

As I said, creating an account is optional. Having an account makes sense when you’re running several polls at once because it will help you keep track of them.

Taken together, Doodle is a decision tool cooked down to the minimum. Using smart settings and options, it can become an invaluable helper in everyday life.

If you came here for that other type of doodle, check out Karl’s article Do you Doodle? Share your doodles with the world!

Will you Doodle? What works best for you in juggling group decisions? Share your ideas and solutions within the comments!

Image credits: woodsy

Now you can collaborate across countries and time zones with ease and for free.

I started by browsing on over to: http://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=94

I downloaded and installed the 3.2MB application. Once it finished installing it prompted me to restart any and all Microsoft Office applications and Firefox”¦ Wait”¦ What?

Microsoft acknowledged that it is not the only popular browser on the market? WOW! That’s a huge step for the boys in Redmond. Before we start let’s take a look at the system requirements. That way we don’t get you all worked up over nothing

System requirements:

• Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, Windows Vista Home Premium, Windows Vista Ultimate, Windows XP Service Pack 2
• 700MHz CPU
• Memory: Minimum 256MB of RAM (512 MB recommended)
• Hard disk: 10MB of free hard disk space
• Display: Minimum 800 × 600 screen resolution (1024 × 768 recommended)
• Applications: DirectX 8.0 or higher installed on your computer
• Internet connection: Broadband Internet access, 300 kbps minimum. Slower connections may work, but the experience may not be optimal.
• A Windows Live ID if you want to start your own sessions (you do not need one to join someone else’s session).

I did as I was told and restarted my applications. And then I fired up SharedView.

The box above was shown in my upper left hand corner of my desktop.

I signed in using my old school Hotmail account and proceeded to click on Start a new session.

It gives you the information you need to get to your participants. The users that will connect to your session will need all the above information. They do not need anything, not even a email address to connect.

When the users click on the link they will see this:

They need to click install and run the attachment like so:

They run through a brief installation and then you will see the attendee arrive and then they will be displayed in your participant count at the top of your screen.

Hit the share button and define what you want the participant to see:

The application does not have many options but here they are:

To see Microsoft’s real world example you can click on over to here.

All in all this is a great free application that you may find very useful in your daily activities. Do you love another similar application? What are you waiting for ““ share it with us in the comments.

Listen to the podcast for some more information and insight than what’s available in our quick reviews.

This podcast is available through iTunes so don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast if you have an iPod, or in another podcatcher if you have a different MP3 player.

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With notifu you can send messages to individuals or groups, see if they were received, track who all responded and eventually use the replies to make decisions as a group just like a poll system.

Notifu allows you to send messages through email, SMS, phone and IM networks such as AIM, Gtalk, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo.

The interface is simple, clean and yet stylish. You can send messages as a registered user or an unregistered user (that way you won’t have access to your contacts and stored messages). Click on Send Messages, fill in the details, click send and off goes your message on its way through the path you chose for the delivery.

The “To Field” uses a special syntax to learn about the mode of delivery. Just type in:

NameOfContact <Keyword: AppropriateInformationDependingOnTheModeChosen>

So for example, if you would like to send a SMS to Bruce Wayne at +1-123-456-7890 you would type in “Bruce Wayne <sms:+1-123-456-7890>” in the To Field. Other Mode keywords available are: email, yahoo, icq, msn, gtalk and ph (for voice messages). Of course you would have to follow them up with the appropriate information like phone number in case of ph and gtalk id in case of gtalk.

Notifu offers single address (for individuals), Distribution Address (for groups) as well as escalating addresses. While single and distribution addresses are pretty straight forward, an escalating address lets you specify multiple ways of contacting the same person. All these ways will then be tried one after another until a successful delivery.

Another bit of detail that you can specify while sending a message are the response choices. Response Choices offer the recipients a set of responses with which they can quickly reply back to you. These are also excellent for conducting a poll in a group to reach a consensus.

As people reply to your sent message the poll count starts to accumulate irrespective of the fact whether the reply came from a cell phone or a IM application.

Notifu is great for group of friends trying to choose a place to meet as well as for the serious worker conveying a meeting re-schedule.

Have a go, test it, let us know how you like it. I personally like the interface and a widgety look to the whole scene and I also like that an OpenSocial application is currently under development. That would really spice up things by mixing notifu with social networks.

They mention it should work outside the US and Canada.  However I had problems with the SMS and voice messages.  Let us know your experience with notifu in the comments.