I’m always interested in how people manage their virtual offices as someone who has multiple partnerships with people all around the world.
Running a business with people you’ve not met (or rarely physically get together with) is definitely a challenge but the the large range of Web 2.0 type services always being released there are increasing amounts of ways to make it work – the only problem is the the large number of services available and working out which option to choose.
Gina at LifeHacker put together her Essential tools for the placeless office which is a nice compilation of her favorite tools in running LifeHacker with a team of editors who’ve never met. It’s a nice list.
I’d be interested to hear what tools others use to connect with coworkers?
I like Diigo. It allows you to not only do the tag & bookmark thing, but also to highlight parts of a page, comment directly on the website, email it to friends / family / coworkers / etc, and you can even “copy” your bookmarks to other services, like del.icio.us, Furl, Spurl, and RawSugar.
I absolutely love this tool because I can bring up new people to the team quickly by just pointing my Diigo file. Since my newest employee is completely new to IM, I get to point him to my “stash” and watch him oooh and ahh…
I use writeboard ( http://www.writeboard.com ) for collaboration. It’s quick and easy.
I like to do most things by hand, if I do any business related stuff.
Bugzilla first and foremost. While some other collaborative internal project development tools are use exclusively to fill the gaps. Oh, and of course email.
Telephone is rarely, if ever, used for any normal part of business. (or am I stating the obvious?)
When one of our writers gets a phone call from the boss lady they usually wish they hadn’t ;)
To keep in touch with our writers around the world – and when one of us is working from home and the other is in the office – we use email and ICQ.
Aaron’s suggestion looks rather useful too.
All of my work is online so I find Skype invaluable.
I used to depend on a range of IM and email to communicate, but now I go for Skype whenever possible. Why? Because with all the work I do on the keys, my wrists need a rest. Also, it gets lonely working at times. Hearing a voice makes a difference to the teams I’m working with via the internet.
Tagging for projects has taken a bit leap into what I’m doing now. I tried Diigo and similar, but they are just too slow for me so I’ll stick with del.ic.ious for now.
I also use Basecamp because it has lists and an online word processor similar to writeboard, all in one package.