The Four Essential Apps for Distributed Teams

Written by Steven Walling / July 13, 2009 5:30 PM / 35 Comments

Distributed teams. Virtual work. Placeless offices. Whatever you want to call them, groups who work from geographically separate locations are more common than ever.

Despite how widespread this mode of coordinating work has become, there are those still wondering just what tools are absolutely crucial to making a distributed team work. Here's a list of the four types of applications you'll need, and some examples of the popular places to get them.

Of course, the following list is missing something: email. Truth be told, we won't waste your time by outlining why email is indispensable. What we will say is that the following four utilities are all things that will pare down your daily email burden.

One: IM & Chat

Instant messaging and chat are one item, practically speaking, but they tend to serve different, equally-important social functions in the enterprise.

One-to-one IM is the best way to ping your virtual coworkers, and is really the only app that comes close to the easy access you'd get from collocation. Cross-platform apps like Adium and Pidgin are extremely popular, in addition to utilities packaged with whatever OS you work from. Enterprise instant messaging services like Microsoft Office Communications Server and Lotus Sametime have been around since the late 90s.

Group chat is slightly less common a need than IM, and is less useful for informal access in your daily workflows. But for certain use cases, only group chat will do. Skype and Campfire from 37Signals can't be beat from our perspective, though there are enterprise-specific options out there. If you're looking for a network that's dead reliable, you could go old school and opt for an IRC channel.

Two: Wiki

We pointedly chose not to mention the generalized notion of a "knowledge base" or document repository. A fully-collaborative space for documents is a necessity, not an experimental accessory to your tool set. What's more, wikis are by-and-large either free or relatively cheap.

In terms of getting one, wikis offer some of the most diverse (and confusing) options out there. You can get free software like MediaWiki or DokuWiki. You could also go with a hosted provider such as PBworks, Wikispaces, Zoho Wiki or EditMe. Options for the enterprise often do a lot more than just wiki besides, and the leaders in that sense include Confluence, Mindtouch, Socialtext, and XWiki.

Three: Task Tracking

By task tracking, we mean any tool that exists to keep track of the group's work. These can be issue trackers like JIRA, Trac, or Redmine. For those less-development oriented, it might be something tailored only to project management, like Basecamp, LiquidPlanner, or the offerings from Microsoft and Oracle.

Four: Web Conferencing

Web conferencing is the most formal of these four applications. It might seem like a fairly dull use of the Web to be conducting meetings over it, but often as not it's the only application to come close to replacing face-to-face meetings.

If you're looking for full video and audio capabilities, conferencing is the most resource-heavy of the quartet, which is why there are more options available from big vendors. The most popular these days include: WebEx from Cisco, GoToMeeting, and Adobe Connect.

Image credit: hangglide from Flickr

Comments

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So basically you're saying we should all start off with Google Domain Apps and go from there? You've got my vote!

Posted by: Aaron Smith | July 13, 2009 2:20 PM

Agree! I find google docs and their co-editing features very useful as well as a lightweight shared conferencing tool.

In addition, distributed teams that have folks disconnected often and want to share files, discussions, forms, etc can use Groove (MS office 2007 utlimate) but it does have a higher ramp-up hurdle (but unique collaboration capabilities once your users are there)

Posted by: Eduardo Jezierski | July 13, 2009 2:24 PM

My team uses a private FriendFeed room for quick discussions around topics. We've used both Skype and Campfire, but FF is great for our workflow. And, since our whole team was already on FF, it was VERY easy to adopt this tool.

We also use Basecamp for task and deadline management and Skype for video conferencing. We have a team of about a dozen people that work from all four corners of America and even couple in Europe.

Posted by: Scott M. | July 13, 2009 2:24 PM

Don't forget network connectivity via something like Remobo and Google Apps for email!

Posted by: Gee | July 13, 2009 2:53 PM

SecondLife.com handy for virtual face-to-face work. Spent 2 mos. on the Office Live Island project. Elluminate.com has webex-like free version for small groups.

Posted by: Dallas McPheeters | July 13, 2009 3:01 PM

For TIme Tracking I highly recommend the extremely light weight mite: http://mite.yo.lk/en/.

And: There is an iPhone page and a native Mac OS X Leopard client, too.

Posted by: Ralf | July 13, 2009 3:11 PM

Great list - we use Skype as well in our team for IM, and ClientSpot (http://www.myclientspot.com) for task and time tracking, online documents, shared calendar, etc.

And of course, the occasional phone call on a real phone :-)

Posted by: Lisa | July 13, 2009 4:32 PM

Or, you could use Central Desktop and get Tasks, Wikis and Web Conferencing (plus a whole lot more) under one single umbrella.

Simplify your life!

Posted by: Isaac Garcia | July 13, 2009 6:38 PM

Steven, for web conferencing, you should add dimdim.com too. It is free for upto 20 users and open source.

Posted by: Krishnan | July 13, 2009 7:28 PM

I think that Google Docs and their co-operation of the editing features are very useful, as well as a lightweight tool for sharing session.

Posted by: Ricky | July 13, 2009 7:54 PM

but often as not it's the only application to come close to replacing face-to-face meetings.

Posted by: rs gold | July 13, 2009 11:17 PM

I've been working this way for more than a decade. Most of your general categories are correct, though I would say "web conferencing" is a bit overhyped. My company currently does staff meetings in IRC and it works fine, especially with good supporting tools like a paste-bin, bots, and a wiki-like web collaboration tool. Lots of open source projects where collaborators are widely geographically dispersed also work this way.

Speaking of which... I'll do a little related self-promotion. I'm the project lead on an open source Rails app that is "wiki-like" and offers a bit more options than the traditional wiki. It's called Kete (Māori word for basket) and you can find an example of it and its community site at http://kete.net.nz/.

Besides the software community using it for collaboration, my coworkers and I (we all work from home) use it as an extranet/intranet/knowledge base platform, too.

It was originally designed for a community collaborative history project at http://horowhenua.kete.net.nz/, but has pretty broad application.

The upcoming release will include features for cross site integration of content as well.

Posted by: Walter McGinnis | July 14, 2009 2:20 AM

I can't believe you guys missed Huddle.net from this list.

Posted by: Mike Butcher | July 14, 2009 2:21 AM

(Disclaimer, I'm on Yuuguu Dev Team)

We work successfully in a remote team so thought I could offer some suggestions. We use Yuuguu for cross platform IM & web conferencing (both as a group and 1:1) - code reviews, design meetings, even our virtual pint at the end of the week. We use Yuuguu's Skype integration for voice communication.

Enough of the "hard sell", but its free for teams of up to five people and $15 a month for larger teams.

We also use MediaWiki and Bugzilla for the Wiki and tracking and find both of these useful and easy to use.

Regards, Phill.

Posted by: Phill Coleman | July 14, 2009 3:07 AM

Adium's not cross-platform, it's for Mac OS X only.

Posted by: João Campos | July 14, 2009 4:08 AM

Nobody has yet mentioned Voxwire for web conferencing. Voxwire is browser-based, so it works on any operating system and it has all the features of the other guys: white board, desktop sharing, powerpoint, live video presentation, recording (with free file hosting) and really nice audio and video performance. It's also cheaper than all the other guys by at least 10$/month. It's relatively new, which is why you might not have heard of it, but it'll be big news in no time. http://www.voxwire.com

Posted by: Anneke Rudegeair | July 14, 2009 7:02 AM

Dallas makes a good point. Second Life can be used as a good alternative to WebEx because you also get this telepresence on a budget with the 3D avatar GUI. I recently interviewed a VP at Forterra who makes a technology similar to Second Life only more focused on distributed team collaboration.

Posted by: Glenn | July 14, 2009 8:59 AM

An alternative that wasn't listed for web conferencing is Rhub. Unlike any other web conference company out there they offer an appliance approach so you can own it. They talk about the benefits here http://www.rhubcom.com/web_conferencing/benefit.html#own_it

Posted by: Chris | July 14, 2009 2:32 PM

I love helpful posts like these! Of course Fuze Meeting wasn't mentioned, but I am sure it was an oversight. :)

The best situation is when #1 and #4 are integrated -- only one solution has federated IM and web conferencing...Fuze Meeting...

If you want your web conferences to be in HD, be easy to join, and start on time -- give our service a try.

Hit me up with more questions... @patrickmoran

Posted by: Patrick Moran | July 14, 2009 2:55 PM

Good article Steven. But without a structured framework, virtual meetings using web conferencing and social networking tools can be just as dysfunctional as some face to face meetings. For more complex projects such as strategic planning workshops, Grouputer provides a structured, shared workspace with integrated web conferencing, group decision support, application & desktop sharing, surveys, voting and reporting tools. Grouputer sessions can be synchronous or asynchronous (self guided). [Disclaimer - I work for Grouputer!] visit www.grouputer.com

Posted by: David Hudson | July 14, 2009 6:13 PM

In order to make working in distributed teams truly collaborative social tools work by letting people connect account-to-account. Applications such as project management and time tracking should do the same so you don't need to log into a different account for each team or project you're on. This is a real issue for groups of freelancers.

Posted by: Joe Piekarz | July 14, 2009 7:09 PM

I've used each of the webconferencing services listed here. You can't beat dimdim's for value.

Posted by: Sean | July 15, 2009 6:15 PM

For the task tracking category I would also recommend Intervals, especially if you need to track time to see how effective your team is handling tasks.

Posted by: John | July 16, 2009 4:28 PM

For real time collaboration, for both group meetings (collaborative note-taking) and for skype meetings, we use http://etherpad.com. It has really real time sync (each character shows up to everyone right when it's typed) and it auto-color codes everyone's input. It's our tool until Google Wave shows up... if Wave works well.

Posted by: Brian LaLonde | July 18, 2009 9:04 AM

I'd like to suggest another software tool that will be of immense value to distributed technical project teams - especially when planning and implementing time-constrained changes to Business Critical IT systems.

If you are still using Excel to construct Runbooks or Playbooks to manage the absolutely crucial phase of a project i.e. the ovenight or weekend implementation AND if your teams are geographically distributed, you should take a look at ICEflo on http://www.iceflo.com.

We have just released the first commercial version of this innovative SaaS solution for Implementation Management and will be building in features such as IM, Blogs etc in the near future.

Regards
Andy (CEO Agenor Technology)

Posted by: Andy Smith | July 20, 2009 11:22 AM

For project/task management I would also recommend 5pm (www.5pmweb.com). It features a very clean and fast interface.

Also Google Docs is a great tool for group editing documents - the recent updates makes it even more attractive.

Posted by: Darren | July 29, 2009 9:20 AM

Some things I'd like to see in Basecamp:

- Sometimes I don't want ToDo items removed from view when completed. I want a checkbox to still show those -- just crossed out with a line through them.

- On some projects, I only like to create 3 message threads -- Status Updates, Questions, and Other. Unfortunately when I do this, the messages inside the thread are not paginated. Also, I want to see the latest message at the top rather than clicking the message thread and scrolling to the bottom every time.

Posted by: Mike McKee | July 29, 2009 9:47 AM

Surprised to see JIRA and Trac listed actually, figured they had outlived their function in modern ticket workflow. Maybe we're stuck with a thousand form fields and bad UI mindsets when you think about a large audience cause people know the names. I'd think something like http://lighthouseapp.com is a better fit for issue trackers, especially Distributed teams with it's email and API options.

Posted by: Will | July 31, 2009 3:27 PM

First of all, let me thank you for having a list of only 4 items. So many lists have 10, 25 or 50 "top" items...

I went directly to the 2nd point, which is the one I am more familiar with. Wikis. TikiWiki CMS/Groupware is also an excellent option when looking for a multilingual wiki that is tightly integrated with a comprehensive set of CMS and groupware features. It is free and open source, and supported by a large and highly skilled international development team.

I work for a print/web communications agency of 20+ employees and we use it as an internal project management tool. We also implemented Tiki for a few clients as their intranet/extranet wiki. Lastly, the web division uses Tiki as a CMS to build corporate websites.

Posted by: S | August 2, 2009 7:20 PM

There are some great comments here. I think it shows the broad-based need for such tools when you are working with distributed teams. We are planning an integration with Mindtouch to give us a more enterprise offering if a user company requires it. In my view, these applications will only be as good as they can interface with other sources of data and information.

The comment above, "Also, I want to see the latest message at the top rather than clicking the message thread and scrolling to the bottom every time." in relation to Basecamp makes some sense. We are exploring that option within Pelotonics right now!

Posted by: Troy Malone | August 3, 2009 8:37 AM

Don't forget the many Platform as a Service options available today. Ours, WorkXpress, allows users to even access ALL of their data and apps on their iPhone. Work ANYWHERE. www.workxpress.com

Posted by: Jake Burns | August 3, 2009 9:19 AM

Bitweaver ranks 10th in the WikiMatrix Top 25 most popular wiki CMS.

Features that set Bitweaver apart among the Top 10 include:

Datastorage
MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Firebird

Extras
Blog, Calendar, Image and File Galleries, Forums, Groups, Tags

Bitweaver is an advanced, Open Source, Object Oriented, Content Management System (CMS) and Web Application Framework written in PHP. It's strength lies in it's highly modular and easily extensible design. This high degree of flexibility is considered "large grained modularity" and gives developers freedom to interleave open-source and proprietary code seamlessly.

bitweaver has been designed from the very beginning, for speed from end-to-end: schema design, query utilization, and software design - a highly tuned, performance engine. The use of standard compliant XHTML Strict 1.0 and sophisticated tableless CSS has made bitweaver stand above the rest in the web application world. The well organized, nested style class system gives you substantial freedom with CSS based styling, with the least amount of work.

With bitweaver, you are in control. bitweaver goes out of its way to let you make the decisions and design choices that best suit your problem.

Posted by: EdwinInTampa | August 5, 2009 9:39 AM

I have used several SCM tools over the past 15 years on small and very large projects, and distributed is the way to go. AccuRev is the only non-distributed system I would consider, only because it behaves like one but requires you to be connected to the central server. The biggest advantage distributed systems have over their counterparts is the ability to handling merging better and code refactoring (file renames). It is a nightmare in other systems. Renaming in TortoiseHg is not exactly as elegant as other DVSC systems, but can be accomplished by right clicking the file in the Commit dialog and selecting "xxxx was renamed/moved to yyyy".

Posted by: vitamin k | December 18, 2009 9:40 PM