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I collaborate with colleagues in other cities using other operating systems. My colleagues are in the public service and so have limited flexibility to configure their (windows) machines. I want to be able to show them what I'm doing and ideally see what they are doing. How have people tackled this problem? We presently use R but other options are possible.

Glorfindel
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Andrew Robinson
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  • Perhaps, this question should be on superuser. There are web based software tools which would let your audience to see your desktop via a browser. Some of these tools also let you delegate control to your audience so that they can open docs/files at their end and it will show up on everyone's screen. Some commercial tools are gotomypc.com, webex etc – varty Nov 09 '11 at 00:48

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The easiest answer would seem to be to use web conferencing software such as WebEx. You set up a meeting, everyone signs in from their computer, and whoever the organizer of the meeting is can designate a person as "presenter". That person clicks on a button and everyone can see their desktop.

Wikipedia has a comparison page for web conferencing software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_conferencing_software. I don't know if free/open source is important; there do not seem to be many offerings in that category, but OpenMeetings sounds promising. (I don't have experience with them.)

Erik P.
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  • (similar to Erik P, but a different brand) We do this all the time via LiveMeeting -- you share your desktop, but can switch so you're looking at somebody else's desktop. – zbicyclist Nov 09 '11 at 04:23
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I suggest RStudio, which would permit your users to run R from a browser and have access to whatever files and R packages you install on your RStudio server. Here is a video walkthrough of setting up a free cloud instance via Amazon. See the notes associated with that video for further install instructions. Note that in practice I have found that more than a few users can max out the CPUs on the free tier, so you may consider either using your own server or using one of Amazon's pay tiers.

All you'd need in addition would be a live screencast to guide your users.

Mike Lawrence
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