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Software for a Virtual Office?
Omega1045 asks: "I am working on a team that will soon be merging with another group of developers a thousand miles away, plus we already have remote people. Having been in this position at a previous job, I have used applications like IM, NetMeeting, email and a lot of phone calls to keep people in touch. Even with these things, there is still a lot missing in making sure we have good communication between members of the team. In my previous experience, we spent too much time on simple tasks like making sure everyone had the same copy of a file, the same update project schedule, etc. What tools would you recommend for a team working in Windows development? What experiences, good and bad, have you had with 'virtual office' applications. I am currently testing Groove Virtual Office which I spotted on Slashdot, earlier. Does Slashdot have recommendations for free software, or moderately priced commercial software, that might fig the bill?"
``we spent too much time on simple tasks like making sure everyone had the same copy of a file, the same update project schedule, etc.''
That sounds like nothing a version control system couldn't take care of. I don't know about other systems, but I have good experiences with Subversion, and I am told there are Windows clients for it.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Novell has heard the cry of thousands before you and they have developed a solution. Novell Virtual Office runs on Open Enterprise Server(OES) which can be either Netware or SuSE Linux.
Sorry, MS is not a supported platform for this solution. MS did try their own solution but it fell way short with Share Point. Share Point blows chunks and sucks balls at the same time!
Xerox's Docushare product is like Sharepoint on Steroids.
Calendandering, versioning, chats & forumns, plus its a EDM (Electronic Document Manager), this coupled with e-mail, IM and a decent CVS, should keep you up to date.
Groove Office is supposed to be pretty good as well, but I haven't used it much, just Docushare. Plus I love Docushare because you can have a Linux(or better yet FreeBSD!) Front-End to a MS-SQL server.
Rule of Life Number 2: Remember, it can all go to hell at any minute. --Jimmy Buffet
I work in a company of some 3000 people. The biggest issues we have with the "glue-ware" applications, which are used to keep everybody on the same page, come when the glue-ware requires a specific web browser to work, or is a binary that only works on one type of machine.
Now that the IT managers have got enough complaints, we are moving away from this. But the number of times I had to seek out a Windows machine, just to file a trip expense report, was not even funny.
Use Sharepoint, someone flamed sharepoint, but I have been able to provide a much richer collaboration experience for all parties involved. I even got the sales team to use it. The ability to create lists allows me to replace home grown software used for management purposes. The document management may be better in Xerox's product, but I haven't used it and sounds like it does what Sharepoint does. Sharepoint is free, but only runs on windows.
Use CVS! it's free and beats a lot of commercial software with its merging capabilities.
Create a server for collaboration. Include a development database and manage it properly. Allow all developers to connect to it. But make broadcast messages when a change has been made to it. Update the source code based on tags from CVS to keep it stable.
All the things that you would have to download, install, configure, understand in order to get a linux box ready for remote use are already available in a base install of Windows Server 2003.
You pick, it's your time and money.
- List of people, contacts
- Vocabulary used on the project
- Team's To Do List
- Team's Nice to have List
- Team's Ideas' Box
- Team's Tools List (with URLs)
- Presentation of arrays describing any kind of affectation/associations, who's doing what for instance
... and many other usefull information that needs to be share and also concurrently managed
Choosing a solution offering a Wiki plus many more tools to manage a project is certainly the best Way. I use a home made one but was told GForge was good. In addition to the shared knowledge base, people need to communicate. I recommand tools like Instant Messaging (Trillian) and emails (but try to define policies about emails use to avoid spams), but no phone! Calling someone by phone is perharps more enjoyable, but it implies a "both side lock" (both conterpart must be present at the same time) and no traces! To reinforce those tools, you can set a forum to ease discussions, debates and, of course, a good bug tracking system (I personally appreciate Mantis) to manage properly the bugs fix. No need to say that a versionning system has to be used! I'm still on CVS but plan to switch to Subversion.I had issues running sharepoint with web other applications running on the same install of IIS. But there are ways around it.
.NET apps to co-exist.
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1. Make sure to exclude the path to your other web applications, in the sharepoint administration
2. Look at this article for web.config modifications that will allow sharepoint and
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb