One of the tools some of us at Telligent have come to rely on is Jing. Jing allows you to record a screencast with minimal effort and upload it to screencast.com for other people to view. Think Camtasia, but much simpler (in fact, both Jing and Camtasia come from TechSmith, the makers of Snag-It). According to the Jing FAQ:

• It's free (for now)
• It's open to anyone (no invite-only beta stuff)
• It's not a product (yet); it's a project
• They provide 200MB storage and 1GB bandwidth for free on screencast.com (resets monthly)
• Runs on both Windows and Mac

Like I said, a few of us have been using Jing for a few weeks now and it's become an essential communication tool. For instance, Leon and I (ok, mostly Leon) are building an add-on component to Community Server 2008 and we need to provide periodic updates to Jose, Rob, Jason, and Scott. By far the most effective way for us to do this has been to record screencasts using Jing and then sending those guys the links for them to watch and provide feedback. Jing has helped shorten the feedback loop, which is critical for us with our current milestones.

The other thing that Jing does is limit you to recording 5 minute videos. At first I thought that would be a major problem, but it turns out the 5 minute limitation is a blessing, for these reasons:

• It forces you to focus on exactly what you need to show and nothing more. If you can't show progress in 5 minutes, something is wrong.
• The guys I mentioned above rarely have 5 minutes to spare anyway. Those guys have a lot on their plate and get pulled in many directions, so it's important to give them something they can view quickly, give us feedback, and get back to what they were doing.

So for us, Jing has proved to be invaluable. It's definitely something you need to check out.

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