When you are working on software with developers who are geo-located in different timezones, communication is key. Our team has tried a variety of approaches to bridge the distance. Some of the challenges are technical, others are social or habitual.
We have been talking for a while about what technology we could put into place to improve the quality, consistency, and presence of our communications.
Here are some of the features team members have requested:
- Instant
- Choice in Clients
- Privacy
- Video / Voice
- Saved and Searchable
- Real Time Presence
- Ability to Ignore indirect messages
- IRC-like Room chat
Here are some tools we currently use:
Email
Pros Email is awesome for threaded conversations, especially when an immediate response is not necessary.
Cons Unfortunately, email tends to have a high noise to signal ratio, and the tenor of messages is sometimes lost. Threads can grow to ridiculous size when new Subject fields are not properly used.
IM
(Skype, Live Communicator, AIM, GTalk, etc)
Pros IM can be a great way to get or send information ASAP.
Cons Communication is very dependent on availability. When team members are not online, IM is rendered useless, and can even cause frustration. Working with multiple IM systems at the same time can be painful. It is possible those 10 messages you sent over IM will be lost completely because the target went offline, and you will be closing your client soon too. No IRC-like Room
Video Conferencing
Pros Video is real-time and communicates subtleties and nuance better than text or voice only.
Cons Video conferencing can be expensive to do right, quality can vary greatly, and it can present a host of technical challenges. Conversation is real time only. Notes can be manually taken and transposed to text, otherwise conversation is not logged or searchable.
Voice
Pros Like video, inflection and meaning is communicated via audio that does not always come through in text.
Cons Calls, like Video are real time only. When participants don’t speak clearly or loudly, it’s easy for a part of the conversation that happens in one room to be missed by the other room entirely.
IRC
Pros IRC provides the ability for the team to have instant chat in a Room, or one to one. Conversations can be logged, and therefore searchable. Bots are fun.
Cons IRC takes a bit of getting used to, and user interface for non-tech team members is not very friendly or familiar. Depending on your company’s policies, running an IRC room on an outside server may not be an option, and you may not want or be able to set up your own IRC Server.
Last week we tested the use of a mashup of GTalk and Yammer to see how many of the needs listed above could be satisfied.
Here are my findings so far:
· Instant: Yammer has a great notification system which includes support for notification and response via IM, SMS and Email amongst other methods.
· Versatile Client Options: I have tested it with Digsby via GTalk notification. I get messages instantly and can respond from whatever IM client I choose and am not limited to 150px wide conversations (like one is in Skype). Clients exist for Mac, Windows and Linux.
· Privacy: A Yammer group can serve as a private room where messages are only shared amongst members.
· Video: Integration with GTalk means we could have easy access to Google’s Video Chat: http://www.google.com/talk/ I it’s not group video capable, but we can probably continue to use Skype for that.
· Saved and Searchable: Yammer conversations are logged and searchable.
· Simulated Remote Presence: Real Time availability and presence notification could be accomplished if we all agree to use Gtalk as the IM client. (another one might work too)
· Notification Options: Activity Digest (never, daily, or weekly), granular email notification control, granular real-time (email, IM, SMS) notification control.
· API and Integration: Yammer has an API and has a lot of plugins and integrations including SharePoint
· Extra Features: Polls, Events, Questions, Ideas, Praise and ‘like’
· Mobile: iPhone, Blackberry, SMS, Windows Mobile, and Android native apps are all also available
Summary
I have found the Gtalk/Yammer combo to be very interesting. It ticks all the boxes for the desired features stated at the start. An additional feature that is not offered by the other methods is the ability to get a daily digest notification of the Group communications via email. This allows for a casual scan of the conversations of the day that you may have missed if your IM client was off or you were otherwise unavailable.
It does not come without issue though. If I want to post to my group on Yammer via a GTalk client I need to prepend the message with: “to:mygroupname”
That’s a pain. Also, the initial setup of notification preferences and linking them to your GTalk account involves more set-up than other chat methods.
All that said, I think this combo has potential as a killer communications solution. Yammer and GTalk both have great APIs and I think an Open Source GTalk client could be tweaked easily to fix the biggest issues.
Recent Comments