Really Long Distance Collaboration
Written by Robin on August 25th, 2008
Image via Wikipedia The GMking staff is extremely geographically diverse, which makes communication and decision making processes much harder. Many of our staff have an 8 hour or more time gap (which probably explains why some of us are such night-owls 
).
How do we all stay in touch? Easy!
- Google Chat, we all love it, and you should too. If you have a GMail account it’s that poor little-used widget on the left side of your mailbox. It also lets you talk to your AIM and ICQ buddies, should you have any
- Yahoo Mail has a similar feature, but for YIM and MSN contacts, which you could probably use if your team mainly used those services instead of Jabber/AIM/ICQ.
- Meebo is the all in one online instant messenger. It supports ICQ, AIM, Jabber (GTalk too), MSN and YIM. I use this quite often since I have a lot of contacts spread over many different networks, and I don’t want to suck up 2GB of ram with a dozen different clients (no one mention trillion!).
- Email comes in handy too, for when we need to reach someone who isn’t online just then.
- Staff Forums keep us all moving in the same director toward the same goals.
Overall, we don’t use any fancy silver-bullet solutions for our communication needs, we just apply what we already have, and use it to furnish our team environment.
Related articles you might find interesting…
- Slick IM for Windows Mobile
- Google to Connect to Other IM Networks Using Jabber Transports
- Google Talk And Windows Live Messenger 9 Get Friendly
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25
AM
Maybe all your teams worldwide would benefit from an unique, central corporate Jabber/XMPP server at gmking.org domain, like your e-mail adresses and server.
Thus you would have the same address for Jabber and e-mail. This is cool(tm).
You would have control on your internal data, they would not spread across proprietary, centralized IMP networks.
By opening your corporate Jabber server to server-to-server trafic (S2S), you would benefit from the worldwide federation of Jabber servers, thus your teammates can talk to any Jabber account on earth. Like e-mail, which is cool(tm).
By setting up transports (gateways) to legacy, proprietary IMP solutions, you would offer a migration path to all your colleagues and employees.
XMPP, like e-mail, is the way to go.
Nÿco