Real Time Online Collaboration

Real Time Online Collaboration

updated by rck, 2008-03-08

Sometimes, a forum or even a chat is not enough. You want direct communication with someone across the world, with voice and visual support. For quite some time now Skype is one of the leading Voice-over-IP solutions, even having support for connecting to the outside world (=regular phones) and creating phone conferences (=phoning with multiple people).

Add a nice screen-sharing program to that, maybe even a collection of web-based productivity applications and you should be able to discuss and write down your ideas pretty quickly.

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Acknowledgement
The images used here (the ones not being screen-shots) have been downloaded from stock.xchng, which I love using for free stock art. They have a lot of nice pictures here. Working together 3. Used for the teaser-image. By robinsonma. Girl with Headphones. Used as illustration for the Skype-Page. By juliaf. Differences between the linked images and the ones I'm displaying can be explained by heavy usage of Photoshop.

Acknowledgement

The images used here (the ones not being screen-shots) have been downloaded from stock.xchng, which I love using for free stock art. They have a lot of nice pictures here.

Working together 3. Used for the teaser-image. By robinsonma.
Girl with Headphones. Used as illustration for the Skype-Page. By juliaf.

Differences between the linked images and the ones I'm displaying can be explained by heavy usage of Photoshop.

Links
Collaborative Software. On Wikipedia. Focus of this article was synchronous conferencing, but of course there's also Mail, Chats, Wikis, Web Portals, Online Communities (like kiesler.at), Forums, Social Software, etc. Google Calendar. Useful for sharing your schedule. Now also able to synchronize with Outlook (yay!), tough I haven't tested this yet. Google Documents. An (almost) full-fledged Office-Solution with a couple of nice collaboration features, included chat and ability to for example connect the Spreadsheet with realtime-data. NetMeeting. Apparently, currently being replaced by SharedView. A nice tool to share your screen, a white-board, chat and exchange files. Slightly dated, but powerful never the less. Skype. Do voice- and video chat, world-wide, without paying for it. The screen-sharing features available as plug-ins for Skype did not work for me. Virtual Network Computing (short VNC). Not exactly as nice as NetMeeting (you'll lose the ability to control your mouse on your PC if you share your screen), you also need a server-part running. But multi-platform. World Clock. See on one single page the current time of a lot of the worlds' cities. Mine would be "Vienna".

Links

Collaborative Software. On Wikipedia. Focus of this article was synchronous conferencing, but of course there's also Mail, Chats, Wikis, Web Portals, Online Communities (like kiesler.at), Forums, Social Software, etc.
Google Calendar. Useful for sharing your schedule. Now also able to synchronize with Outlook (yay!), tough I haven't tested this yet.
Google Documents. An (almost) full-fledged Office-Solution with a couple of nice collaboration features, included chat and ability to for example connect the Spreadsheet with realtime-data.
NetMeeting. Apparently, currently being replaced by SharedView. A nice tool to share your screen, a white-board, chat and exchange files. Slightly dated, but powerful never the less.
Skype. Do voice- and video chat, world-wide, without paying for it. The screen-sharing features available as plug-ins for Skype did not work for me.
Virtual Network Computing (short VNC). Not exactly as nice as NetMeeting (you'll lose the ability to control your mouse on your PC if you share your screen), you also need a server-part running. But multi-platform.
World Clock. See on one single page the current time of a lot of the worlds' cities. Mine would be "Vienna".

Enjoy
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