Advanced Reality Inc., a company specializing in peer-to-peer collaboration technology, has recently announced Jybe, a free beta release of a new browser-based collaboration service. Jybe enables you to use your browser as the delivery mechanism for co-browsing and PowerPoint presentation sessions that you can invite people to attend.

Web conferencing tools have offered co-browsing and PowerPoint presentation facilities for some time now, but Jybe takes away the need to install a dedicated tool to access those functions and provides browser plugins to turn your browser (IE or FireFox) into a full co-browsing, live presentation and text chat collaboration channel.

At present, plugins are only available for the Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox browsers. These plugins are easily downloaded and installed, creating an additional minimal toolbar in your browser. This gives you the ability to create, join and end a Jybe session.

By simply clicking on the "Create Session" toolbar button, you can initiate a Jybe session. A popup window is displayed, in which you enter your name and a session name. Your browser will then display a resizable text chat window with an area to view the names of session attendees.

There is no facility to invite participants from the Jybe interface at the moment, so you will have to provide the session name to invitees by an alternative method (phone, email, IM, etc.).

To join a session, a participant must have an appropriate Jybe browser plugin installed, click the "Join Session" toolbar button and enter the session name: the session content is immediately displayed in their browser.

The "follow me" functionality of Jybe is two-way, which means that if anyone in the session (not just the session creator) goes to a different URL, all of the attendees are taken to that page. As the service is refined and more functionality added, I would expect to see some options to control how this feature is used by session participants.

An additional part of the service, "Jybe Presentation Zone", allows you to upload one PowerPoint presentation to an online storage area (subsequent uploaded presentations overwrite the existing one). The presentation is then automatically converted into HTML pages, which are made available for display in a Jybe session. (Disappointingly, these pages are optimized for Internet Explorer and do not display properly in Firefox.)

Unfortunately, to view a PowerPoint presentation all participants have to visit a specific URL and login using a generated password to view the presentation. If this step could be avoided in some way it would make access and use of this facility much better.

Corporate licenses are available, at a price, to those companies that wish to deploy the Jybe service internally, while managing their own client licenses and server software.

Jybe is an innovative solution to uncomplicated online collaboration and live presentation needs. No doubt, as the product matures and nears a full production release, it will acquire more features, some of which will be offered for a fee as a necessary component of a sustainable business model.

As a beta release, this is an interesting prelude to the future Jybe service. If your online collaboration and live presentation needs are limited to co-browsing, delivery of PowerPoint presentations converted to JPG files and a basic text chat facility, this free service is well worth a try for a taste of things to come.

Pricing: Free

Registration and download: http://www.jybe.com/download/login.aspx

More info: http://www.jybe.com

System requirements: http://www.jybe.com/FAQ.html