ViewShare improvements

[Ryan Lederman]

In the latest stable build, 3.04.10, several important changes have been made to the ViewShare product. For those of you who are unaware, a ViewShare session takes place something like the following:

1. Customer and Staff Member are engaged in chat
2. Staff Member decides he wants to walk the customer through a procedure that the customer will understand better if he can see the Staff Member’s screen.
3. Staff Member clicks the ViewShare button in the chat window in LiveResponse.
4. Customer’s web browser is directed to the Staff Member’s computer which is now running a ViewShare server.

In the past, ViewShare would always use the first IP address found on the Staff Member’s computer. This works fine in most situations, however there are certain configurations, such as LANs where this isn’t always viable.

If the Staff Member’s computer isn’t actually connected directly to the Internet through a modem (e.g. behind a router or firewall), then the IP address of the Staff Member’s computer isn’t even available to the outside world outside of the LAN. This creates the following scenario:

1. ViewShare listens on IP address: 192.168.0.100 (internal network IP address)
2. Customer’s browser now tries to open http://192.168.0.100, which is most likely going to either connect to another computer on the customer’s LAN (if they are using the same address schema), or time out trying to connect to an unknown address.

This has been bypassed in the latest version of ViewShare by allowing the Staff Members to specify their own IP address manually. Instead of allowing ViewShare to pick the IP address to use - which may be incorrect, the IP address of the router or firewall can be entered instead. This results in the customer’s browser connecting back to the proper IP address, and a successful ViewShare session.

It is important to note, however that manually entering the correct external IP address will not be enough to make this system work properly. You will also need to configure the firewall/router to forward connections to the ViewShare port to the correct internal IP address. For example, the Staff Member’s internal IP address is 192.168.0.111 and ViewShare is configured on port 5055. The router/firewall must then be configured to forward all connections on port 5055 to the address 192.168.1.111. This will ensure that connections are properly made to the right Staff Member.

If more than one Staff Member will be using ViewShare in this fashion, each Staff Member’s computer must be configured to use a different port for ViewShare, so that connections can be properly forwarded by the router/firewall to the correct addresses.

ViewShare-Settings.png

In addition to this important new feature, it is now possible to configure the image quality of the ViewShare server. Basically, there are 3 settings: Low, Medium, and High. This refers to the quality of the screen image that will be presented to the customer. Low quality will be grainy, but also will run faster and may be beneficial to customers who are on a slow Internet connection.


The default is Medium, but this can now be changed to suit your company’s needs.