Introducing DeskTrust Connect: the free replacement for Zoom, TeamViewer, and Slack
By The DeskTrust Team
DeskTrust has always been a productivity monitoring tool. Screenshots, activity, timesheets — the stuff you need to run a distributed team. But every customer we\'ve talked to in the last year has said some version of the same thing: "We use DeskTrust for tracking, and then we also pay for Slack, Zoom, and something for screen sharing."
Fair. Those are separate products. But they don\'t need to be separate. The same team, the same login, the same billing relationship — three vendors when it could be one.
Today we\'re launching DeskTrust Connect: the comms add-on to your existing DeskTrust subscription.
What Connect includes
- Team chat. Direct messages, group rooms (both ad-hoc and auto-provisioned per team), attachments up to 25 MB, reactions, @mentions, message search.
- Voice + video calls. 1:1 and group calls from any chat room. Active-speaker detection. In-call screen share with one-click take-over.
- Standalone screen broadcasts. Share your screen to a whole team room without ringing anyone. Watchers drop in and out.
- Manager-initiated screen viewing. Consent-first: every session requires the employee to actively approve. Persistent red indicator. Full audit trail. See the design deep-dive for why this matters.
- Session recording. Server-side WebM recordings with configurable retention. Plays back with seek support directly in your dashboard.
Pricing
Free. Included with every paid DeskTrust plan. Everything above (chat, calls, screen sharing, manager view, recording) works without an extra cent on your invoice.
See why we chose to bundle it for free.
To enable: Dashboard → Billing → DeskTrust Connect → click Turn Connect on.
What Connect is NOT
Connect is not a Slack killer. It\'s not a Zoom competitor. It\'s the collaboration surface for teams that already use DeskTrust — designed to consolidate three tools into one bill, not to unseat the best-in-class version of any single thing.
If your team is 80% engineers who live in Slack all day, they\'ll probably still want Slack. But if you\'re running a support org, an agency, a BPO, or any team where "the DeskTrust dashboard" is already the daily driver, Connect will do the job of the extra tools.
What\'s next
We built this end-to-end in a compressed timeline (see the engineering notes). The v1 is real and usable today. The v1.1 roadmap includes:
- Multi-participant tiled recording composition (v1 records the main video track + first audio only)
- Native mobile clients
- Slack-style channels for larger orgs
- External participants (bring a client onto a call without giving them a DeskTrust account)
Try it. Tell us what breaks. That\'s how the roadmap actually gets shaped.