Live Collaboration Nirvana = Skype + Yugma

• March 1st, 2007 /
•  Chris Schultz

As many of our readers know, Voodoo Ventures is a virtual company. There are two of us in New Orleans and our team of developers is in Kazan, Russia. We collaborate on all of our projects, primarily siteMighty right now.

Over the past year, we’ve refined our collaboration environment, primarily through our implementation of Basecamp, the excellent project management tool by 37signals. Inspired by ReadWriteWeb’s great post on Software for Virtual Teams, I’ll provide a quick listing of the collaboration tools we use:

• Basecamp – project management
• Freshbooks – invoicing for client work by Flatsourcing
• Google Calendar – keeps us on the same page
• Dropsend – for sending large files

Recently, it has become more important to us to be able to collaborate in a live environment. We rarely get to sit face-to-face with our development team, and I told Oleg I wanted to build a virtual collaboration environment for us that simulated us sitting together in person working on the same computer.

Live collaboration has become more important for us now that we have launched siteMighty. During development, it worked well to communicate via Basecamp what the development priorities were for the month and they would do it. Now, the things that we need to focus on change daily based on feedback we get from users. Rather than large complex projects, we are focusing much more on specific, “bite sized”, tasks. And though they may be simple, it is much easier to show Oleg what I want to change than it is to write specs on it.

Over the course of the last week we’ve tested several web services, and today we hit on a perfect match. Here’s what we found:

• Skype – We’ve been using Skype for a while and we use it for both IM and calls. Oleg recently installed a webcam, and I have one, so we now are able to video conference with each other. If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend it. I’ve got dual monitors hooked up so I can set up Oleg’s video feed on my side monitor and it literally feels as though he is right beside me as we talk and work together.
• Yugma – Yugma is our latest find, and it is really cool. We are using the free version which is a java-based program that enables screencasting. I can initiate a webconference through Yugma, and our developers can all see my screen as I browse. It also includes markup tools so I can highlight the page so show exactly what I am talking about. Control of the screencast can be passed to any member on the conference.

Both of these services are Free. That makes them really make sense for us. As we conferenced today, we all were remarking on how amazing it is to be able to collaborate in a live environment like this. We’re looking forward to using these tools to continue to improve our productivity.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on these tools or any others that you use to collaborate.

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• categories: All, Flatsourcing /