That was fast -- TeamViewer 7 goes from beta to gold in a week

It’s barely a week since the first public beta, but the Windows version of TeamViewer 7 was still released in full earlier today. And this is no cosmetic upgrade. The popular remote access tool has been revitalized with some major features that open it up to an entirely new audience.

Top of the list is TeamViewer’s new ability to hold online meetings for up to 25 people. Despatch email invitations to your prospective attendees, and when the time arrives they’ll be able to join you via smartphones, tablets or computers. The program provides just about all the functionality you’d expect from this kind of group collaboration tool, with everyone at the meeting able to view the same screen, see and hear everything you’re doing, exchange text chat, use a white board and share files. And it’s even possible to record a video of the event for convenient reference later.

And even if this is of no interest to you, the work that’s been done to support the meetings has resulted in all kinds of spinoffs elsewhere.

So file transfer is now just a matter of dragging and dropping files or folders from a session window to your local PC. New multi-monitor support means you’re able to show separate session windows in each monitor. And a combination of network and display setting optimisations mean performance is faster than ever.

Good news all round, then? Not quite. The release of TeamViewer 7 is for Windows only; the Mac OS and Linux release reportedly won’t be until "the first quarter of 2012", which is a little vague. Mac OS and Linux users can at least participate in the new meetings, though, and everyone else can download the new build now.