The answer is you have to be agile. It has to be a team effort where dysfunction is caught by the team, not by you. Distributed scrum works well for this. With distributed scrum, the tool is very important. Trac/Agilo, Pivotal, JIRA/Greenhopper, etc. You need to make sure that you motivate everyone toward a goal and make the success of the team more important than the success of any individual.
Make sure you have a real-time communication mechanism, jabber, IRC, mumble, etc so that people don't feel isolated. Distributed teams can absolutely work well. You should definitely schedule some sort of face to face interaction at regular intervals to encourage team building and planning for larger projects/problems.
Sun Ultra Enterprise 5000, 8 UltraSPARC processors, 6 gigs of ram, with a Sun fiberchannel array hanging off the side....had thousands of simultaneous connections and it hasn't phased the machine..so I doubt all of that is completely necessary, but the IBM RS6000 R-30 we had the service running on before couldn't handle it, but I like blaming that on AIX.:)
I run Samba for central storage, web publishing, mail directories, etc, etc, for 38,000+ users...on one machine. Requires quite a bit of computing horsepower for such a large user base, but it has never failed. It has met with such success, I've been hired to setup state school districts with similar setups. It's a powerful viable alternative for nicely interfacing with many many different clients...and I have stats to prove it.:)
Slashdot Mirror
The answer is you have to be agile. It has to be a team effort where dysfunction is caught by the team, not by you. Distributed scrum works well for this. With distributed scrum, the tool is very important. Trac/Agilo, Pivotal, JIRA/Greenhopper, etc. You need to make sure that you motivate everyone toward a goal and make the success of the team more important than the success of any individual.
Make sure you have a real-time communication mechanism, jabber, IRC, mumble, etc so that people don't feel isolated. Distributed teams can absolutely work well. You should definitely schedule some sort of face to face interaction at regular intervals to encourage team building and planning for larger projects/problems.
~B
Sun Ultra Enterprise 5000, 8 UltraSPARC processors, 6 gigs of ram, with a Sun fiberchannel array hanging off the side. ...had thousands of simultaneous connections and it hasn't phased the machine..so I doubt all of that is completely necessary, but the IBM RS6000 R-30 we had the service running on before couldn't handle it, but I like blaming that on AIX. :)
I run Samba for central storage, web publishing, mail directories, etc, etc, for 38,000+ users...on one machine. Requires quite a bit of computing horsepower for such a large user base, but it has never failed. It has met with such success, I've been hired to setup state school districts with similar setups. It's a powerful viable alternative for nicely interfacing with many many different clients...and I have stats to prove it. :)