On-Line Collaboration: The Tools

In our previous podcast we discussed the principles of on-line collaboration. In this episode we look at some practical tools for making this work in practice.


MP3 File

Web sites we mentioned in the podcast:

Setting up the project:

• Creating the workspace: Ning, Wiggio, Twitter
• Forming the team: Outsource using Elance.com, Guru.com, Rent-a-coder.com
• Project planning: BasecampHQ.com

Scheduling meetings:

• Send around meeting invites using Outlook, Lotus Notes, etc.
• TimeBridge.com allows you to nominate up to 5 possible times for a meeting
• Tungle.me (and many others) allows you to show the team when you're available for meetings

Conducting on-line meetings:

• Teleconferences, Skype
• Webinars: WebEx, Netmeeting, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar

Informal discussions:

• Discussion forums are useful for asynchronous discussions (Ning provides this facility)
• Chat rooms are good for synchronous discussions (Ning provides this facility)
• Bubbl.us for collaborative mind mapping
• Wallwisher.com to create your own bulletin board - example:
  

Document sharing

• Google Docs: A web-based office productivity suite, i.e. a word-processor, presentation tool, spreadsheet etc.
• Wikis: Web sites for collaboratively editing a collection of interlinked web-pages (e.g. Wikipedia)
• Use a Wiki farm for hosted wikis
• Use Rapidshare or Dropbox for sharing big files

Document management:

• Help desks and issue trackers: Bugzilla, Trac
• Google Docs provides revision control