How do you communicate to teams outside of your city?

Question

My team of 10 developers is working with another team of 10 developers, designers and BAs outside of my office to build a corporate website. There will be a lot of communication, learning and knowledge transfer between the two teams and both teams are in the same time zone. Currently we're using traditional land lines and email to communicate which i believe can be improved.

How do you communicate with teams outside of your office? Do you have any tips/suggestions on how my team can improve communication? On top of my head, we could use webcams.

Answer 1

Developers will be comfortable in an IRC channel. Alternatively you could use something like Campfire.

Answer 2

Use Skype. There is conference calls, video, desktop sharing and it's cheap.

Answer 3

From my experience, I found Microsoft Office Live Meeting really helpful in knowledge sharing and Microsoft Office Communicator for quick interaction with team outside.

Answer 4

Group chat sessions of various types work fairly well until too many people start talking. If there is a teacher/student kind of situation, WebEx presentations work quite well also.

Answer 5

Several approaches:
mail: Gmail
wave: Google Wave
collaborative editing: EtherPad
IRC: ... any
setting up a small news (usenet) server

Answer 6

Twitter has been useful where I work for communicating messages on a broadcast level.

IM through Office Communicator has also been good for talking to different people in an immediate fashion.

The company I work for also has some software that enables the sharing of a desktop for another option in communicating.

Answer 7

We are using mail and phone calls, but i got in the google wave preview and i think it's going to be a strong option when it goes live

Answer 8

Set up an Exchange server to have your calendar/tasks synchronized + mail.

For verbal + video communication use Skype. For Desktop Sharing use GoToMeeting.

Answer 9

Hi

Lots of good suggestions already. My outfit has video-conferencing (runs over IP I believe) in every location, which works very well. And don't forget matters such as sharing a common repository for code (we use Subversion, works fine across the network), for documents (we use Sharepoint which I hate, but it does provide a common location for all project documentation which is accessible globally) and similar stuff.

Regards

Mark

Answer 10

In the team I am working on these days we use:

• Skype, for team meetings and one to one communication.
• Email (gmail) for global communication and one to one, one to several, communication.
• Cell phone, just in case of emergency.

And we are quite a bunch of people working from several places (Canada, Mexico, SF, etc).

Answer 11

Lots of different options here.

• Skype or Windows Live for voice and/or video calls.
• Collaborative editors such as SubEthaEdit or ACE.
• Desktop sharing, either through Skype or iChat etc.
• SVN for version control.
• Then there's traditional telephone and email...

Probably many more too.

Answer 12

I'm not sure how practical this would be for your team but don't rule out meeting face to face sometimes. I work in a distributed team and every so often we do get a chance to meet face to face, this helps build relationships between the teams at both sites and helps make email, IM and phone conversations more effective as your not just talking to a stranger you've never meet.

One project I'm working on at the moment has used:

• Skype (Voice, IM and desktop sharing)
• Email
• Google docs
• SVN

To be honest any list of software would probably have worked just as well the fact that I got to know the people I'm working with has probably been the biggest help.

Answer 13

We use http://jaconda.im to organize project rooms and for collaboration between developers. It supports Gtalk (jabber) only though, but so far is much more convenient than say Campfire.

Answer 14

To communicate with developers, business analyst and system engineers located in other offices we use the following tools:

Microsoft Office Live Meeting

Microsoft Office Communicator

Voip

If we have to talk with customers located in different parts and don't have anything of the above mentioned tools then we go for

gtalk

skype

Answer 15

My last job was supporting an international science project. While many of us wrote software as part of that, our goal wasn't software development per se. We had people in Europe and all across the U.S. What I can recall using was:

• Email
• Telephone calls
• Teleconferences when we needed to converse with several people. We tried videoconferences briefly, but at the time the cost was prohibitive.
• Postings to private web sites that we were supposed to check regularly
• Private wikis and web forums

This isn't as new & fresh as some things, but it worked. We added some capabilities (e.g. wikis) as they became available if they gave us new capabilities. However, we usually kept things as they were when they already worked (e.g. using conventional telephone/teleconferencing instead of Skype). Bear in mind that we started in the 1990's and changing what works and is already established isn't an easy thing, or necessarily wise. I left that project a little more than a year ago, and AFAIK, they're still doing things the same way.