I've done a lot of telecommuting in my life. My first real writing gig came when I was 16 as a freelancer for a computer magazine whose offices were 3,000 miles from my house, and since then I've worked for a number of blogs, web startups, and computer game companies in an online, virtual office environment. During that time I've found that the key to a successful distributed team is communication. The difference between the ventures that failed and those that succeeded was how well set up the communication structure was for the team.
We all love Basecamp, which I think is an invaluable app for distributed teams (we use it here at Read/WriteWeb). It's a superb way to communicate and keep track of every facet of your project. But back when I started telecommuting, there was no Basecamp, so we had to cobble together our own solution, mostly from opensource software. These days, there are is even more great software available to teams who want to assemble their own virtual office. Below are some of the tools every team needs to create their own Fakecamp.
We already tend to think of email as an antiquated form of communication. In the age of text messages and IM, email seems so... slow. But it's still a great way for teams to communicate. It commands attention (who doesn't read everything not in their spam folder?), it's personal, versatile, and it is asynchronous (meaning not everyone has to be there at once for it to work).
Taking asynchronous communication to another level, forums usually command a starring role in any groupware solution (the 'Messages' feature that anchors the communication tools in Basecamp, for example). Forums let team members hash out ideas and plan projects in an organized manner. The great advantage of forums over email is that there is a searchable record of everything you write and you'll never waste time by accidentally cutting a team member out of the loop. Simple Machines Forum is one of the most fully developed open source forum systems, with a built-in calendar and a large community of developers supporting it via addons and plugins. It is a good choice for any team.
Don't like Simple Machines Forum? Try phpBB, MyBB, PunBB, vBulletin, or Invision Power Board
In the early part of this decade I worked for a computer game company that had team members spread across the US, Germany, Sweden, and Australia. We made extensive use of wikis to keep our design and planning documents in order. Our wiki let us write and edit documents as a team, easily and without fear that someone would accidentally overwrite something important. MediaWiki is a good choice of wiki software, but there are literally hundreds of wiki variants to choose from (we actually used WackoWiki), so find whichever appeals to you and your team.
Sometimes you just need say it out loud. Skype lets you conduct a conference call with the programmer in Frankfurt, the designer in Sydney, and the copy writer in Chicago -- for free. It also supports text chat/instant messaging and file transfer. Forums just don't facilitate speedy communication, and let's face it, sometimes you don't want to wait for a reply; real-time, one-to-one chat over an instant messaging network is a great tool to have in your team's arsenal.
Don't like Skpe? Try AIM, MSN/Live, Yahoo, ICQ, Google, or FreeConferenceCalls.com (low-tech, but no computer required)
Sometimes teams need to easily share and edit formatted documents, which means forums and wikis aren't ideal. You could pass documents back and forth across email, but that can get messy very quickly. A better alternative is to use Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Just the other day Richard shared an Excel spreadsheet via Google Docs & Spreadsheets with myself and other Read/WriteWeb writers. It was great to be able to sign in to Google, know I was seeing exactly what Richard wanted me to see, and edit right there if I wanted to.
Don't like Google Docs & Spreadsheets? Try Zoho, gOFFICE or ThinkFree
Online mind-mapping tools are great. Being able to sit down with another team member and map out a database, or the page structure for a website, or the levels for a game, etc. is invaluable. None of these tools existed when I first started, but they're great to take advantage of now. Thinkature is one such tool, and also supports voice chat so you can talk through your flowcharting.
Don't like Thinkature? Try MindMeister, Gliffy, Kayuda, Bubbl.us, Mindomo, Flowchart.com, Comapping, or Mind42
Sometimes you just need to send a file quickly and easily that too big for email or forum attachments. When that happens, I turn to Senduit, which lets me upload files up to 100mb and send them off to colleagues. Senduit is far from the only file sending service, it just happens to be my favorite (YouSendIt, zUpload, DropSend and LeapFILE are some others). You should find the one that works well for your team.
So you're probably thinking, why would I do all this when I could just use Basecamp or one of its competitors? Well, you might not. But maybe you want to exercise more control over how you set up your virtual office by building from the ground up using online tools. Rolling your own online office means you control what features go into it. The above services and applications will help you to successfully craft an online workspace for your distributed team that will facilitate the communication necessary to succeed.
What else would you include in your online office? Any services we missed? Anything critical you can't get to work without? Leave a note in the comments.
Note: I chose not to include a separate category for calendars since many of the mentioned forum systems have them built in.
Also remember to vote in this week's R/WW poll about which online collaboration tool you use, keeping in mind that for some teams it might be best to assemble your own.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Rolling Your Own Online Office.
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Hi Josh,
Thank you for the great roundup! You had me at the edge of my seat hoping, hand wringing with anticipation that you might have a suggestion for our nearly two-month long search for the right project management/collaborative solution. Sadly, there is no mention of your general project management options such as resource scheduling/assignment (beyond calendaring, more along the lines of "emp A is booked at 75% capacity", etc) and gantt or pert charts.
I still appreciate the information though and suppose I'd just better get back to the search!
Posted by: Danielle | June 12, 2007 7:39 PM-D
Other companies are using videocasts with PPT slides integrated in them to communicate in place of meetings. IBM works with a client of mine (Interactive Video Technologies) and there, employees send each other video links using a product called IVT Studio that have their slides/graphs/screen captures, with them walking through the content the same way you would in a face to face. It's an effective way to still put in some face time, and yet talk about something that might not be explained as well strictly on paper. It's a good solution for telecommuters and for big companies that have a scattered workforce.
Best part? You can check up on who watched and for how long, etc.--something you can't always measure with server access and wikis, since employees can simply fib and say "sure, I saw it" when they really didn't give something a single second of their time.
Posted by: Matt Mendolera | June 12, 2007 8:00 PMThanks for a great article. I was actually just going over the pros/cons of Basecamp & its competitors this afternoon, so this was very useful!
Posted by: Will | June 12, 2007 8:06 PMI think you overlooked ContactOffice (the Beta can be tried out here - http://beta.contactoffice.com/) ... It's a relatively unknown company and product from my home country, but I think it can easily compete with any of the services you listed in the poll.
Posted by: Robin Wauters | June 13, 2007 1:07 AMI think you overlooked ContactOffice (the Beta can be tried out here - http://beta.contactoffice.com/) ... It's a relatively unknown company and product from my home country, but I think it can easily compete with any of the services you listed in the poll.
Posted by: Robin Wauters | June 13, 2007 1:10 AMBasecamp looks like a useful application, but i think most distributed offices are still located in one city/ area, so phone and personal meeting remain the most common ways of communication.
Posted by: Alex | June 13, 2007 7:42 AMThanks for the great article. I believe in fact that with this online doc from google we'll see more partnership between Apple and google which will extent their functionality to Macs
Posted by: Themacthinker | June 13, 2007 8:21 AMhttp://www.mostofmymac.com
Awesome article, pretty complete. But you forgot two important things:
1) Whiteboard application: Vyew.com is amazing to share with your team some ppt slides or other document you are working on.
2) Something to help organize your sleep since emails never stop coming... too many timezones. :)
Posted by: Danilo | June 13, 2007 8:25 AMI work with a distributed team (US, UK, and India) on web design projects. We use Protonotes http://www.protonotes.com/ to annotate/collaborate on the websites that we work on. It's kind of like a wiki and discussion board on top of our prototypes.
Posted by: Amanda | June 13, 2007 8:26 AMJosh,
Your post is great. I must say you right; communication with your employees is very critical and can determine the success of the business. I had to learn it the hard way while I had my business running. It took me time to understand that my web designers in India would not know the different between Gucci Sunglasses of men and DG for women. So for a month I had pages on my site displaying the wrong items. I had to kill a whole afternoon explaining the differences between unisex sunglasses, men and women as well as the logo of every brand. I can agree with the say "a business is only as good as its employees."
Posted by: The Big Wholesaler | June 13, 2007 8:40 AMregarding forums...
http://getvanilla.com
it rocks.
Posted by: celsius | June 13, 2007 8:54 AMYou missed project reporting, also known as the "hated timesheet". Nobody gets paid without the timesheet. I invite you to check out www.timeXchange.net to see the first platform where people connect to create, manage, and report time to projects. Basecamp does do timesheets, if you log into each project separately. timeX has all your projects in one place. That's the difference between an application and a platform. Basecamp is an application.
Posted by: Joe Piekarz | June 13, 2007 9:08 AMI use activeCollab (an open source clone of Basecamp) and Subversion on a daily basis, I guess Subversion is more for us programmers but I still felt that it deserved mention. Interesting post though!
Posted by: Sid | June 13, 2007 9:13 AM@ Danielle:
dotroject did the trick for me. The other candidate I would check would be e-groupware. e-groupware has more features, but most I did not find necessary. For project management, dotproject is great. Easy to install, gantt charts and all.
Good luck!
Posted by: MeTheGeek | June 13, 2007 9:14 AMThanks for the list! I agree with Sid about activeCollab and Subversion. Just to add my two coppers the Vanilla Forum software might also be worth a look. It's easy to install and works really well.
http://lussumo.com/
Posted by: leland | June 13, 2007 9:25 AMYou should also mentino desktop OSes like EyeOS
Posted by: Marcel | June 13, 2007 9:29 AMhttp://eyeos.org
Sorry, EyeOs is a not a desktop OS, it's a "Web Operating System"
Posted by: Marcel | June 13, 2007 9:31 AMHere are the links to both systems. Also note that both are open source
http://www.dotproject.net/
http://www.egroupware.org/
Posted by: MeTheGeek | June 13, 2007 9:43 AM@Alex:
Actually, I think the opposite direction is the trend.
Plus, people that work "on the road" a lot do not want to carry a big heavy laptop.
That is why this subject is so relevant, and gets more relevant everyday.
Posted by: MeTheGeek | June 13, 2007 9:57 AMIs it just me, or protonotes web page looks too much like 37signals?
Posted by: MeTheGeek | June 13, 2007 10:00 AMHi Josh,
This is Austin from Yugma (www.yugma.com).
Based on your blog, I thought you and your readers may be interested in trying our web conferencing and collaboration service. Since its debut last December, it has been growing strong through real users trying out our product. We are completely focused on being extremely easy, inexpensive, and cross-platform compatible. In addition to having excellent service for Windows users, we’ve been getting great reviews for our ease of use and support for Mac users. (See: http://www.joonyou.com ). We also recently launched support for Linux (8 versions supported).
Feature highlights:
- Invite up to 10 people for free
- Built-in file and application sharing
- Session recording and playback
- Real-time chat
- Annotating and highlighting tools
- You can embed Yugma in your site or application
- Remote PC access
- Secure and reliable
- No Spyware, Adware or Malware
I encourage you to try our service out. We currently offer 15 days of trial Premium Service, and our basic version is FREE forever. It allows you to invite up to 10 attendees, anytime. Add in a whiteboard and free teleconferencing… the features and price are hard to beat!
I hope you like what we’ve put together. If you have any comments or suggestions, we’d love to hear from you. Just email us at info@yugma.com. Thanks!
Best regards,
Posted by: Austin | June 13, 2007 11:42 AMAustin Sponsel
———
Marketing Intern
www.yugma.com
Hi Josh, I would like to throw out there http://www.santexq.com its a online project/task manager, we had Basecamp here and it really didn't do much for us, and Santex Q so far does the job, it could really go well with all these other solutions you posted, plus its free, so it doesn't hurt to take a look does it?
Posted by: Nes Lopez | June 13, 2007 12:33 PMthanks.
You should check out my google summer of code project. It is a module for the Drupal CMS.
http://xamox.net/drupal/
I basically plan to take basecamps functionality and put it into a module for drupal. Then using drupal you can do all the other things you mention above. It is all open source as well.
Posted by: xamox | June 13, 2007 12:42 PM-xamox
Josh, why don't you use blogs and social networks?
blogs + wiki + documents + RSS reader + social networking = Blogtronix
Posted by: Dimitar Vesselinov | June 13, 2007 7:07 PMhttp://blogtronix.com/
ReadWriteWeb was one of the first places to break the news on ShareOffice, the world's first online office based on open standards, one of the largest commercial mash-ups, and the first online office integrated with salesforce.com and available now in the AppExchange.
"ShareOffice Launches - Open Standards Based Web Office Suite"
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/shareoffice_launches.php
Posted by: Eric Hoffert | June 13, 2007 7:23 PMNice article!!
Posted by: daryoko | June 13, 2007 8:05 PMI think it's very usefull...
What about Panthius?
http://www.panthius.com
Does a whole lot of this stuff in one place, integrated.
Posted by: Ted Williams | June 14, 2007 4:26 AMComapping is amazing. Thanks for the heads us. Its not just a pure mind mapping tool but seems as if it can be used for a whole array of things such as project management, note taking, minute taking etc. Plus the collaboration aspect is the best I have seen so far,
Posted by: yasmin | June 14, 2007 7:38 AMThere are great opportunities to be had with web2.0 customizable collaborative web spaces. These come as services like www.ning.com or Barnraisers www.barnraiser.net.
Leading the way in terms of open source is AROUNDMe which is a perfect solution for anyone wishing to create a collaborative social space on the Web. It has forums, blogs, event managers, a wiki and a poll which are all customizable and can be placed anywhere within your own collaborative web site - more info at www.barnraiser.org
Posted by: tom | June 14, 2007 8:43 AMWe used to be a Basecamp customer and used Google Docs, and after hitting its limits, we looked around and found http://www.centraldesktop.com
We are pretty happy with a single sign on and a single interface for most of our office/project management stuff.
Posted by: Adam | June 14, 2007 8:45 AMWonderful Ubiquitous World with Think Free
Posted by: Hugo Jung | June 14, 2007 4:27 PMProbably worth tracking the hard financial accounting data if you are putting together an online office.
Saasu.com has a product called NetAccounts which is fairly popular for small business and internal project teams that need self sufficient infrastructure to account for time, expenses, recharging, etc.. There is a free or paid version, it works with salesforce.com (for the CRM freaks out there) and campaignmonitor.com (email mkting) pretty easily too.
Of course the other guys like NetSuite work too but can be too big for a project or too expensive very small business. For smaller project recharge stuff there are a bunch of invoicing only web based solutions.
For email marketing we use campaignmonitor.com which is also good and are huge fans of 37signals approach.
Cheers, Peter (from Saasu.com makers of NetAccounts)
Posted by: Peter J Cooper | June 17, 2007 11:49 PMWe're a small team of under 10 people, mostly based in the UK but working with partners in the US and USSR. We use a lot of web apps for sharing and collaborating on projects - including the obligatory 37signals apps, also Blinksale, Google Docs&Spreadsheets, Wufoo, JotSpot and of course our own DropSend.com. Ryan wrote a post about our experiments in running an 'online' office here
Posted by: Lisa Price | June 18, 2007 2:03 AMExcellent round-up of the hard stuff. Tx. What about the people side, the methods for using these tools? In our research and work with clients, we've found the distinguishing characteristic of successful virtual working to be consistency. Where's the light switch in the virtual team room? You always want to find it in the same place but most virtual spaces require a treasure hunt.
Posted by: jessica lipnack | July 8, 2007 4:23 AMFabulous. Great resource for anybody who is a web entrepreneur.
Posted by: Kashif | July 20, 2007 12:51 PM