Most of the time our project teams share a physical desk and workspace, but occasionally we need to share a desk and workspace with someone miles apart. The distances makes sharing ideas and collaborating with team members harder to do.
As an effort to bridge the physical distance between teams, we’ve been exploring the use of Google Hangouts.
One of the first things I do in the morning is plug in an external video camera and join our project specific Hangout. Once the team has joined, we leave a live video stream going throughout the day. This makes it easy to share thoughts and ideas, as well as reinforce the sense of team across the miles. Google Hangouts also makes it easy to share a screen, online documents and other collaborative tools.
We’ve weathered some of the early adopter pain (UI changes, feature changes, etc), and made the Hangout a daily part of showing up at the office. What tools and resources do you use to help connect with remote teammates?
3 Comments
I currently work from home, so almost all of my interactions are remote (for both teammates and clients). For teammates, we all use Microsoft Messenger to communicate throughout the day with either chat, or video calls. It also hase some nice functions for sharing links/files/images/presence/etc. For clients, we almost always use Citrix GoToMeeting. It works great for meetings large and small, and most people have at least heard of it (and you don’t need an account if you are just joining a meeting already in progress). There are some very nice functions to manage a presentation. It’s also nice to have for some remote troubleshooting scenarios since it allows you to control other machines remotely.
Thanks for sharing Karl! Have you ran into any issues working between a Mac and PC with Messenger? I haven’t used Messenger in quite some time because of compatibility issues, and wonder if those have been smoothed out.
None of us have Macs, so I’m really not sure how well it works. Looking at the web site, http://www.microsoft.com/mac/messenger, it looks like it has been refreshed pretty recently. If you wanted to give it a try and need a messenger contact, feel free to add me as a contact (using the email I provided in the comment form).