How CoScreen’s Cloud-Hosted Screen Sharing and Workplace Collaboration Tool Keeps Teams Agile

TL; DR: CoScreen reimagines remote collaboration with a screen sharing and video chat application that enables robust co-editing capabilities. The solution, centered on providing focus without friction, is designed to help teams get work done. As a remote company itself, CoScreen knows how to bring distributed teams together to achieve success.

Burnout has long existed in the modern-day lifestyle, but it’s taking on a whole new form in the pandemic era: Zoom fatigue.

This type of mental exhaustion can occur with nearly any virtual meeting platform. Researchers say increased cognitive strain — caused by prolonged eye contact, mirror-induced anxiety, and reduced mobility — is to blame.

In a recent survey of professionals in the UK, 38% of respondents said they experienced video fatigue during the coronavirus outbreak. As businesses increasingly commit to permanent remote workplaces, it’s becoming essential to mitigate the adverse effects of virtual meetings.

CoScreen, a sharing and workplace collaboration tool, does just that. The cloud-hosted technology was built to foster deep collaboration — a highly productive type of teamwork made possible by eliminating virtual barriers to success.

“With CoScreen, users can actually work together to solve problems in one platform rather than have a meeting discussing a problem and then go your separate ways,” said May Lauren Arad, Product Marketing Manager at CoScreen. “The possibilities are endless.”

CoScreen’s remote collaboration platform is designed to take users above and beyond simple remote communication. In true agile fashion, the platform allows multiple users to share and edit windows — which could contain content like code — as if they were on the same computer. At the same time, audio and video chat capabilities streamline communication.

Remote teams around the globe are quickly adopting CoScreen’s remote conferencing solutions. With ample investments from Unusual Ventures, SAP, and various tech industry names, CoScreen has the potential to transform remote work as we know it.

Co-Founders Till Pieper, Max Andaker, and Jason Thomas worked on CoScreen as a side project for years before building an official prototype to validate their idea in 2019.

The trio used their experience as product leads and engineers at Google, SAP, and HireVue to design a collaboration platform for developers that allowed them to work together more quickly — even if they were in the same large office. For that reason, CoScreen features numerous tools for sharing and editing integrated development environments (IDEs) and dev tools.

“We pride ourselves on being a tool built for engineers, by engineers,” May said. “We understand concepts like remote pair programming, remote mob programming, debugging, and incident report management — all of which require a lot more than your standard collaboration environments.”

“The way it came about was engineers needed a solution to work together quickly, even if they were in the same large office,” May said. “In many cases, they just need two seconds to work on something together without bringing a laptop to someone’s office,” she said. “That’s how it evolved throughout the years.”

May told us that nearly any knowledge worker can use the technology.

“We empower teams to collaborate better and more efficiently — it doesn’t matter if you’re in a remote, co-located, or hybrid working environment,” she said. “We advise up to 10 participants to share, edit, and work together at a time, and kind of step away from video chat tools into collaboration tools. The difference with CoScreen is that it takes just a single click to collaborate.”

Of course, the recent shift toward remote and distributed workplaces created an opportunity for CoScreen to serve the needs of virtual teams.

“The transition during COVID was a really rough patch for a lot of teams that were not used to having a remote setup or options,” May said. “There was a lot of talk about always being in meetings — and we solve that problem.”

“Meeting” has become somewhat of a dirty word over the past 18 months — and one which the team at CoScreen is working to replace. Instead of calendars full of meetings, the company promotes deep collaboration through a joint online workspace. The idea is to get real work done virtually, with the added benefit of social interaction.

Between managing projects, creating software, and bringing together distributed teams, CoScreen has numerous use cases.

“We use CoScreen internally; if we have a big event, we keep a screen open for the entire workday so the team can pop in,” May said. “For example, we recently launched CoScreen v2, and the founders were there if you wanted to jump in and see what’s going on, share something, or have a cup of coffee together.”

CoScreen v2 and subsequent releases brought forward Windows compatibility and all-new features like calling and extra-large video popouts.

“With the v2 version, you can call someone, so if they’re on CoScreen and they are available, and not in another session, you can just bring them up, which is really exciting, because then you don’t have to create a whole fuss about sending a calendar invite or setting aside time for a lengthy meeting. We make it as fast as possible to get on the same page and move forward.”

The technology facilitates seamless interactions via integrations with popular productivity tools, including Slack, Google Meet, and Fantastical.

“CoScreen is great — it’s the best collaboration tool I’ve used!” said Butch Anton, Solution Architect at SAP. “The voice quality is excellent, the screen sharing is seamless, and the integration with Slack makes it super-easy to start a session with someone with whom you’re chatting.”

“No other tool as of today does what we do, the extent that we do it with, and the flexibility that we are allowing users to have,” May said. “We focused on the need employees have to get work done together, no matter where they are. It’s so much more than screen sharing.”

As for what’s coming next, May said CoScreen has numerous projects in store, but all are under tight wraps. In the meantime, she let us know that the company will remain focused on gathering user input.

“We just released CoScreen v2, so we’re still getting a lot of feedback,” she said. “The way it works is we have a huge group of superfans who love the product, and we listen to what they want and what they need.”

And, although it caters to other groups as well, CoScreen will always remain developer-focused. “We’re always looking for feedback on what dev teams want — that’s how we operate, and that’s been really successful,” May said.

The CoScreen team hopes to meet in person for the first time ever once pandemic outbreaks cease.

“We are remote-first, but I’m excited to meet everyone for the first time,” she said. “But CoScreen has helped to bridge scattered social gaps.”