Telecommuting

The Register has an interesting article on telecommuting stats.

With Telligent, I'm working from my home office currently. Initially, we're going to try to go with a true distributed model with most of our employees. I think this is great because it doesn't limit our hiring geographically, and I would contest that the technology is there to easily collaborate still.

We use things like SourceGear's Vault for our distributed source control. IMHO, that's still Vault's biggest advantage (among many others, of course) is the ability to easily create a source control solution that can be used world wide with little problems, and still amazingly fast speeds.

We use Countersoft's Gemini for issue tracking across all of our projects. Though, I have a serious eye on Sourcegear's Dragnet product that's in the works. I'm hoping Eric can hook me up with a beta! :-)

And, of course, IM is priceless. E-mail is good, but IM is better. Nothing beats immediate gratification.

But, given that there are so many enablers out there now for online collaboration, such as forums, wikis, blogs, issue trackers, free VoIP solutions, why shouldn't this be able to work?

I'm curious to see what everyone else thinks about online collaboration. Are we there yet? Can we piece it together with various products, or do we need products like Groove to help us out?

Thoughts?

Filed under: , ,

Comments

# Robert Hurlbut said:

I worked on a project last year that did the cross-country telecommuting thing. We used SourceGear's Vault (I introduced the product to them). It provided a great help to us, but we also had problems with time zone differences in the check in files. We could easily overwrite other developer changes if two developers were in different time zones alternatingly working on the same set of files. (I am not sure if they have a solution for this in the latest versions, but I know the new VSS/Hateras solution will address this specifically). We used Vault combined with SharePoint for our collaboration solution.

I have also used the Groove product as well. Groove is very a hefty choice, but it does provide everything you may need. The key (IMO) is determining if you need the hefty choice now, or the piece-together solution now that could expand in the future.

Thursday, July 08, 2004 11:07 AM
# SBC said:

Groove 3 (soon to be released) is vastly different from prior versions - for more info see: http://www.groove.net/default.cfm?pagename=betav3_main

Thursday, July 08, 2004 11:23 AM
# matthew said:

I just tried Gemini. It seems pretty crappy. At least the installer didn't pick up the database settings I gave it, so I had to manually edit the web.config. After that the road map gave me an application error which I couldn't be bothered to investigate.

Hence I am sticking with RT from best practical, which is a well-used and popular free system (requires a unix box though).

Friday, July 09, 2004 8:30 AM
# Jason Alexander said:

Hrm, interesting. I've never had any problems like that with Gemini, and I've installed it many times now.

Very odd. All environments are different, though. It's too bad you couldn't get it to work. Look at RT, it far outshines it from what I can tell.

Thanks for the comments, though, Matthew.
-Jason

Friday, July 09, 2004 10:15 AM
# teleworkva1@gmail.com said:

Telecommuting is going to be the trend in the days to come.  It's not so easy to be at home and attend the official work, as you may have to pay attention for domestic work too..

Friday, January 09, 2009 6:21 AM