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?"

Comments

GForge is good stuff

[tcopeland]

...some of the recent changes in CVS have some Microsoft Project integration, too. GForge is pretty good at handling reasonably heavy loads. And you can even get commercial support.

I'm not affiliated with GForge Group, although I was a committer on GForge for a while.

VPN routers, Wikis, and file servers

[treerex]

I spend a majority of my week working from my home office, driving the 50 miles each way into the company's building only a couple of days a week. I have a VPN router (LinkSys RV042) that extends the corporate network into my house. Our team uses a wiki for tracking issues and such, and shared file servers work fine: the approved or cannonical versions of software are put on the server and everyone is expected to stay up-to-date.

The previous reply to use rsync is a good idea if you want to automatically keep (force) everyone to the save versions of files and such.

We haven't used anything like GForge, though we do not have a lot of remote development going on (a few engineers cross country, the rest on the same coast.) Adding another email system (for example) on top of wahtever the corporate email system provides is a waste and senselessly duplicative. Similarly integrating our RCS into another larger system didn't make sense.

Re:Subversion?

[josepha48]

Yes, I'd agree. SourceSafe or CVS would help there.

Also centralized file repositories would help. A place where certain people could put files for others to read and get.

This really sounds like a poorly managed workplace.

More Info on Sharepoint

[c_dog]

My org has recently been experimenting with Sharepoint, and it works well for collaboration and document exchange. Much better than email, IM, etc. The software comes with several templates that let you manipulate the site into being useful for your intended purposes, and it is a free download from Microsoft.

There are only a few caveats that can potentially be a show-stoppers:

1. It requires Windows 2003 Server.
2. You must be willing and able to run IIS on the box. In fact, you really cannot use the IIS instance on the box where you install Sharepoint for any other web applications.
3. Although Microsoft SQL Desktop Engine is included with the Sharepoint installer, using MSDE is not too much fun when it comes time for Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery (no management tools built-in to MSDE). Ideally, a Microsoft SQL Standard Server (locally or on another enterprise maching already filling this role) should be used if you are not comfortable using T-SQL to script MSDE backups.

I've seen other F/OSS solutions out there that run on Apache with PHP or Zope and use MySQL as a DB back-end, but if you're Windows-centric, the Sharepoint install was quick, easy, and did not require much forethought aside from the issues mentioned above. Wouldn't be my first choice for dev collaboration for non-Windows-centric orgs, but sounds like a decent choice for your situation (based on what you told us).

Good luck!

Re:Subversion?

[Mr2cents]

In order to be sure you're convinced, I'll say it once more: you should give tortoisecvs a try.

I also use viewcvs to make the repository visible through a browser, but you're probably doing that too already.

http://viewcvs.sourceforge.net/