Communicating the Plan

The plan is in place, it is set into basecamp. How on Earth do I communicate and work with other people on getting this well thought out list of tasks over the line to completion?

I would suggest that the tools used here, outside of basecamp are the most mature out of all the tools I have used. Predominantly, I have created documents using the writeboards within basecamp, these can be shared and permit collaboration on a single document whilst the changes are tracked as different versions. I can then compare versions to see what has changed. Very nice and erradicates the numerous softcopy versions of the same document that often fly around.

There are other ways of sharing and collaborating on work Adobe have Acrobat and Google’s product is also worth mentioning Google docs. The aim here is a more souped up version of a writeboard, almost a Word replacement. I didn’t like the fact that my docs wouldn’t be centralised in my basecamp account therefore stayed with the basecamp writeboards.

If I wanted to communicate more quickly then I also checked out voip telephony and, to my dismay found the offerings too clunky. They overpromise their service. The providers I tried out were Freshtel and Pennytel. The freshtel service is really light on features such as e-mail voicemail (unified messaging) and the pennytel service is just poor, especially after it promised an iPhone app, it dodn’t work.

Skype is the way forward. Most people seem to be on Skype (a consideration with any IM tool). The service transcends most firewalls and OS issues. If you need to communicate something quickly and it can’t be posted on the writeboard or the message board in basecamp, I recommend Skype – you can always save the transcript to basecamp later.

Finally, a product that I was exposed to and hope to never be exposed to ever again is Microsoft’s Livemeeting. I was given a demo of a product from a chap in London. Before the event I logged into the livemeeting site, ensured my settings were all configured and then on the eve of the demo attempted to log back in….well not-so-Livemeeting – it was like being stuck in a timewarp except the “page loading” (the equivalent of hold music) graphics were slightly better…never again. I much prefer Dim Dim.

Advertisement