Nick Projects

A while back in my post about collaboration while working in a group over the internet;  I mentioned Meebo and that I hate meebo.  This is still true,  but I have found a replacement for the ad-bloated POS.  It is called Chatterous and it makes it easy to have many people on the same conversation.  Chatterouse provides the typical chat interface via their website,  but they also integrate with jabber or G-chat so that you can add a chat room to your instant message utility (digsby).  This eliminates all of the annoying adds from meebo,  but also makes it super easy to make sure you are logged into your chatroom each morning.  There is no browser to close, nothing to open each day.  You just fire up the IM and your golden.  I stongly recomend this format if you work with a few people at once and need a quick way to stay in touch.

Good Job Chatterous!!

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Screen Sharing is another fun topic!  Here’s the setup,  when someone at work is getting a funny error message, has a problem in excel that they can’t solve or in the case of my life has take controll of a client’s machine to get something done and is up against a wall; I walk over and take a look at what’s going on.  Sure we could talk about the issue in my office or over IM or some other system, but, it’s way more efficient for me to just see what they have in front of them.  Also there is a ton of different information on a screen that you would have to explicitly ask about unless you saw their screen.  Of course if you would have to walk 500 miles to see someones desktop in person, you need another option.

Ultra VNC
The first option is probably my favorite because it lends itself to creating lists and directories of links that allow you to take over people’s screens instantly.  The caviat of this one is that you either have to know how to configure your firewall or be on the same network.  Of course if you are on a VPN or using Hamachi much of this is already taken care of for you.  ( this is why I mentioned those tools ).    Youtube has a host of videos about setting up VNC.  This one seems ok.

Ammy Admin:

Ammy Admin was covered a while back (Fix a friend’s computer),  but it is a good tool for this application aswell.  It won’t really allow you to take over people’s computer with one click,  but it is really pretty easy to use and doesn’t require any crazy software or firewall configurations.  This is a good solution for people who really find themselves requireing this functionality seldomly rather than all day.

Both of these systems work well with multiple monitors and have ways to modify the settings for optimizing internet speed.  Both will get the job done and save you from having to walk 500 miles to see what’s going on on people’s screen.

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The goal of communications software for a work from home situation is to allow remote users to share ideas as freely and easily as users in the office.  I outlined an ideal implementation in article one and haven’t been able to find a perfect solution yet,  but I have found many solutions that get close.

My favorite solution is video.  Just having a camera on all day provides a ton of information and communication opportunities.  You know when people are on the phone, when they are away from desks, when their upset or happy,  this is probably the best type of collaboration I have used.  The downside is that it can be sort of taxing on your bandwidth.  Especially if the majority of people on the system are in an office and talking to one or two external people.

TokBox
For video conferencing I recommend tokbox.  Tokbox is a great flash based site that allows you to have live video chats with several people at once.  The system supports pause and mute functions.  It also has a pretty robust text chat feature which is great.  I tried this system for a few weeks with about 6 people.  I feel like it did succeed in extending a great office environment to people working out of the office,  but sadly had to stop using it because 4 people were in the same office which made the system take up way too much band width.  If you were working with people who were all spread out and there was no central office I think this would be a fine solution.

Voxli
For voice chat there is a cool program that just came out called Voxli.  Voxli is designed to be an alternative to programs like teamspeak,  but it doesn’t require a server setup.  This makes configuration super easy which is always a plus.  Voxli allows you to assign a hot key to your microphone so that each time you press the hot key you are broadcasting.  This makes carrying on conversation very simple during the course of the day.  Voxli has some support for text chat, like tokbox,  but it is not as sophisticated as it could be.  Also there is not any security on the site yet,  so if you are whining about customers go ahead but if you are talking about my credit card application its not a good fit. 

Meebo
For plain old text chat the best I’ve found so far is meebo rooms.  I pretty much hate meebo, but basically can’t find anything better.  Rooms can be locked down and the chat features are relatively sophisticated.  Meebo also integrates with many IM clients which is nice,  but it’s no digsby.  My biggest gripe with meebo is that it is exceptionally bloated with advertising,  also I would much prefer to have chat as an offline application rather than having to blow an entire browser window on a chat screen. 

Campfire
Campfire is a better system than meebo,  but it isn’t free so It’s a mixed bag.  Campfire is more business oriented and keeps good logs of what was said.  Much of the chat that comes across our meebo room is about youtube videos so logs are not really required.  For me I don’t get enough utility to justify the cost,  but that’s just me. 

Yammer
For an even more removed solution Yammer is a pretty good way to keep people in the loop.  Yammer is like twitter but for business.  I would think of it this way,  If you wold like a company news letter but don’t have the time, resources, or motivation to write a daily publication;  you can use yammer.  Yammer gives people the ability to constantly update their status during the day so that everyone else can see what’s going on.  This is good for companies that need limited communications between departments.  For example I don’t really need to know that the accounting department is really amuzed by the benny lava video on youtube,  but if they post something like working with client x about renewing.  I may be interested in knowing that client x has something going on right now. 

Blellow
Finally, being at home by yourself,  or just working at a small company will leave you with a lack of people to ask questions to.  Blellow is a good solution for this,  blellow is like a twitter for communities.  With blellow you can ask groups of people their opinions on a variety of topics and if you are asking for help you can rate their responses.  This is a good way to artificially increase your talent pool when you really need it.

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In any job there will be a certain amount of hardware required to be effective.  Working from home is no exception you will want some stuff that may not be typically required for an office type environment.  This stuff will make your life more pleasant so eventually you will want to have most of it.

First: you want a second computer to run communications off of.  Since I haven’t gone into communications yet you may not see the relevance of having an independent machine dedicated to coms,  but it’s the way to go.  Having items on different machines helps in a few ways.  First it is a natural division of labor,  You won’t fill your chat screen with sticky notes,  because you won’t have a sticky note program installed on your coms machine.  When the image your editing crashes your PC,  your coms machine will still be up.  Also it keeps your communications separate from your work.  No one needs to have IM notifications popping up in the middle of their screen all day,  it’s annoying, and when you work from home it happens even more often.  A division of labor is a good way to go.

For a comms laptop I recommend something with average processing power,  and a nice screen.  You can use a touch screen PC if you plan on also using this box for a stereo or some other fun things.  Otherwise a cheap Ebay laptop will cut it.  I strongly recommend using synergy to connect the two machines.  Synergy allows you to share a keyboard and mouse across multiple machines.  This makes having a second computer effortless.  Hopefully in the future some of these functions can be docked to smaller dedicated screens like the ones showed on gizmodo in the linked post,  but these items are hard to come by.

Also you will probably want to pick up a web cam and a microphone.  In my experience microphones that come with web cams are pretty bad quality.  Their good enough to get the job done,  but will drive people crazy if you use one all day.  Monoprice.com has great deals on this type of stuff.  If your office telephone is something IP based and you will be using it from your computer,  you may be able to use a headset for both.  Skype has a wireless headset/microphone that they endorse which looks pretty good.  If your office phone is an actual phone or not built into your computer,  it’s sort of annoying to juggle putting on and taking off your headset all day.  I would recommend a good desk microphone for that environment.

Now that hardware is taken care ouf,  we can get into the more fun business of software to facilitate all of this work from home fun!.

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In any office it is pretty much a requirement to be able to move files across different machines.  Many companies have several shared network drives and highly organized directory structures to allow data to be easy to find and available for all employees to access.  There are dozens of methods to accomplish this in a distributed manner.  This post will cover just a few. 

Hamachi allows users to create VPN networks with minimal configuration.  Simply install Hamachi on all computers to be networked and you are pretty much done.  Setting up a VPN has several advantages.  For starters it networks the computers which will allow file, print and screen sharing across the machines.  This will allow users to map network drives and is also a great way to set up multiplayer games. 

Drop Box:  While simple file sharing utilities won’t give you as much flexibility as the virtual VPN created with Hamachi, it is a great way to move files from one computer to another very quickly.  Dropbox is crazy simple to use and has tons of flexibility for controlling which files get shared and who can see them.  For more information about drop box see my previous post on dropbox. 

Jungle Disk:  Jungle disk is a little less flexible than dropbox but it uses Amazon S3 as the backend.  Jungle Disk is primarily for creating mapped network drives based on S3 buckets.  The advantage is that you get to use the ridiculously powerful Amazon cloud network.  Also for this reason it is a good solution for people who have tons of data to share,  if you deal with large images and can see yourself requiring a network drive with 20 - 40 gb of data on it;  jungle disk is the way to go.  For more details on Jungle Disk see my previous post. 

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This article is to introduce the theme of distributed work groups. Going forward I will highlight several tools that can be used to facilitate remote work conditions The techniques here would be useful to established companies that cope with running multiple locations, or who allow people to work from home but require collaboration between employees. Also these techniques could prove useful to companies that have emerged in a distributed fashion IE web development studios who are essentially a synchronized network of independent contractors working from home in their slippers.

Let’s start with a typical real world office and then attempt to identify the actions that would be required to reproduce that environment. When I sit at my desk I can hear that a colleague is on the phone and two other colleagues are working together on a different issue. When a person finishes they may walk by my office and see what I’m doing and we may talk about nothing for a few minutes. Also I may do the same thing as I get up to refill my coffee. I can also see if someone is frustrated or laughing about something when I walk by to talk to them. The morale of the office is obvious even if no one is saying anything. If an associate needs help on something they will likely yell over to me or walk over and ask me questions. I may want to take a look for myself so I’ll walk over and take a look at their computer. The office is arranged so that people who commonly work together can talk without disturbing groups that work on non-related tasks.

In my opinion the perfect solution would be an implementation of a second life style virtual office environment. Sort of like a cross between a 3d first person shooter and the Sims.  Once in this environment people would be broadcasting and receiving audio through their PC microphones and speakers. Volume would adjust based on someone’s proximity to the person speaking and barriers in the office environment. Two people could theoretically enter an empty office and close the door to isolate themselves from others while speaking. Users should have a seamless transition into video chat at some point in the interaction so that some of the information conveyed non verbally can be transferred. Of course there could also be a host of virtual tools in such an office, things like a cone of silence for private conversation, or force fields for when you don’t want people to bug you. This virtual office could also facilitate virtual white boards for public announcements and other typical office amenities. Not to mention if the solution had the capacity for 3d first person paint ball it may even be fun.

Since this system doesn’t exist the next week or so of posts will evaluate products that can facilitate as much of this functionality as I can find.

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