The new feature is built into the latest version of the GoToMeeting software, and doesn’t require any fancy equipment — any webcam and microphone will do, although headsets will most likely be needed to keep room noise down, or users can choose to dial into an audio bridge. Each stream can be displayed at a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, for a total maximum resolution of 1920 x 960 pixels.

I attended a demo with four attendees, and found it to be easy to use, and the quality to be very good. If you’ve used GoToMeeting before, you know that the software (available for Windows or Mac) is  quick to download, and doesn’t generally require any fiddling with settings. Audio was perfect, and video quality was quite acceptable for standard “talking head” meetings. The folks at GoToMeeting told me that they decided to limit the service to six simultaneous users in order to maintain video quality — plus, with more users, the video thumbnails for each person would be pretty hard to see.

The program automatically displays a split screen divided into the appropriate number of boxes need to show each participant, and a screen sharing space when desired. GoToMeeting has added some useful touches, like a subtle white outline that shows who’s talking at any given moment, and the ability to resize the viewable area to maximize the shared desktop if desired.

The new service occupies a niche between Skype and some of the higher-end video conferencing options that require sophisticated hardware. For organizations and individuals that won’t use the service often enough to justify GoToMeeting’s cost, similar technology will be available later in the year through Skype, since Citrix will be powering Skype’s upcoming web conferencing service.

HDFaces is available to existing GoToMeeting customers and trial users at no additional cost over the service’s standard pricing, which begins at $49/month or $468/year. A 30-day free online trial is available at the service’s website.

Do you use GoToMeeting? Will the addition of video capabilities make the service more attractive?

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• Strategic Implications of the Microsoft/Skype Deal
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

WebWorkerDaily spoke to Chan to find out what’s worked for him and what hasn’t, so other companies can crib from his answers and avoid the school of hard knocks.

Talent

Chan’s first move into web work was to hire a virtual assistant, Marina. She is from the Philippines and eventually came to work directly for ADP, becoming a baseline for the company in the country and helping them hire more people. Having such a linchpin is key, according to Chan.

“If you have one really solid person who you trust in country, whether you know them personally or they come through a reference, that can make or break your whole virtual team,” he says. “I think it’s really been because of Marina that we’ve been able to succeed in working in the Philippines. The same is true now in India. We have one lead person and it’s because of our relationship with him that we can manage the India team without us falling apart.”

An adequate hiring process is also essential. “We hire based on the resume, the portfolio they show us online, and an interview process where my lead person in the Philippines interviews them first and my partner and I do subsequent interviews. Finally we give them a test at the end of the whole process to make sure they can do what they say they can do.” But it wasn’t always that way. Previously, the company simply hired off a resume and a single interview, “but then we found these people were not performing, leaving, slacking off, so that’s when we put in the other procedures.” Problem solved.

Tools

At first, “it was hard for us to figure out how to manage virtual workers properly,” Chan confesses, “but now we’ve put a number of tools in place so we can monitor their hours and then match the hours with the productivity.”

To do so the company uses a range of off-the-shelf, paid-for cloud services. Chan explains: “Basecamp manages all our projects. We use Yammer, a corporate Twitter-like product. As soon as a team member finishes a particular task in Basecamp they have to ‘Yammer’ it. Then we use Skype for one-on-one discussions. We use GoToMeeting for training purposes. We also use SlimTimer to track how much time is actually spent on a particular task. One last tool people might consider using is called RingCentral. Here in the U.S. I have an 800 number for our company and I can parcel out extensions to anyone I want, including people in the Philippines and soon in India.”

Tips

Leave little up to interpretation is Chan’s first tip. He suggests having “a very discreet process for  the tasks you want workers to complete. You can’t be ‘loosey goosey’ on your requirements – it doesn’t work. If it’s left up to interpretation, most of the time it will fail.”

Close collaboration is also important. Chan and his partner meet the entire team virtually every day at one o’clock. “The team we have in the Philippines works California time. That’s a requirement, which is the graveyard shift for them. So we meet every day come rain or come shine and we go through all our projects and everyone gives updates.” This is part of a concerted effort to keep the team cohesive, which also involves giving the team leader in the Philippines resources for team-building meals and drinks on a regular basis. And Chan has also invested in a few face-to-face meetings: “we have visited the Philippines once to get the team all together and we recently flew to Singapore and flew one of the team members there to meet us.”

Finally, Chan advises close attention to avoiding cultural miscues, at least at first. “When I started working with these teams, I was very cautious about what I said, how I said it, being polite. I’m less worried about what I say now because we have built a relationship up. But I think it’s very important that you understand the cultures that you’re dealing with and cultivate that. Then over time you can loosen up,” he says.

Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• The Future of Workplaces

Here is a list of five basic categories of tools all remote workers should have at the ready, and a variety of options to consider for each category.

Document Collaboration and Workspaces

There is a bit of a blur between virtual workspace and project management tools. These tools emphasize collaboration:

1. ideapi. Recently reviewed by Simon, this is a simple online tool for creating documents and collaborating on discrete sections of the documents.

2. Glasscubes. I’ve been using virtual workspace Glasscubes for a while now. Here’s my latest post taking a fresh look at the app.

3. Binfire. A free solution that lets you “manage projects by adding members, creating tasks and milestones, and assigning responsibility.” Here’s what else Amber has to say about Binfire.

4. Hyperoffice. A collaborative suite bundling email and communication, project management, database management and group meetings. Reviewed here by Amber.

Project/Task/People Management

Some of these tools also offer collaboration features, but they are more focused on managing tasks and people and getting things done efficiently.

5. Huddle. Many moons ago, we reviewed Huddle, and the team collaboration space is still going strong.

6. Cohuman. Delegate, assign and prioritize tasks with others for free. It even integrates into Google Apps. Simon published a screencast about this app.

7. Teamly. A collaboration tool with an emphasis on priorities, as Thursday explained in her initial review.

8. ProjectTurf. A collaboration app for running a project including briefs and time cards. Thursday reviewed it here.

9. Zcope. Simon felt this combined project management and collaboration tool had a lot of potential. It has slightly more advanced project management features than many of its competitors.

10. Mavenlink. This SaaS app neatly integrates project management, collaboration and invoicing. I reviewed it recently.

11. Microproject. Simple,  online project management for the smaller team. Here’s our review.

12. Wrike. We’ve covered Wrike several times, including most recently when the company added mobile apps to its project management and collaboration solution.

Desktop Sharing/Presentation/Web Meeting Tools

GoToMeeting is one of the leaders in the desktop sharing/web meeting space  (did you see the announcement of its Skype integration?), but there is an array of other useful remote presentation tools out there:

13. iMeet. Elegantly combines video and audio calls with document sharing. I reviewed it in March.

14. join.me. A  no-registration, free screen sharing app that fills a gap now that DimDim is now defunct. We’ve praised it here on WWD before, including announcing its iPhone app.

15. yaM. An app to streamline the process of holding meetings including planning, scheduling and note taking. See our review.

16. Zipcast. Slideshare’s quick presentation tool adding video and chat to your slideshows for public (free) or private (fee) presentations. Mathew reviewed it here.

17. CrunchConnect. Charles recently reviewed this web conferencing solution with an emphasis on sales.

18. FuzeMeeting. A fee-based video conferencing solution with collaboration features.

19. Yugma. Free and fee-based Web video conferencing with desktop sharing.

20. Zoho Meeting. Free for one-to-one video call meetings, or starting at $12/month for up to five participants.

File Storage/Sharing/Syncing

Giving the entire virtual team access to files – especially big ones – without having to email them back and forth is critical for remote work processes.

21. Dropbox. Store and share files in the cloud securely, and get access to them from your mobile device. Ryan covered the latest version of Dropbox late last year.

22. Box.net. An enterprise-friendly file sharing and collaboration, reviewed most recently by us here.

23. SugarSync.We’ve written about this file sharing and backup solution before including most recently about new features for its iOS app.

Miscellaneous Useful Cloud-Based Tools

A couple of online tools that help you do things that previously required pricey desktop software.

24. Diagram.ly. Simon recently reviewed this easy-to-use site for creating flow charts and other diagrams.

25. Tom’s Planner. A Gantt chart-based planning tool, with easy drag-and-drop functionality; it’s now iPhone and iPad compatible.

What are some of your must-have tools for remote work?

Image courtesy stock.xchng user spekulator

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
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1. Square pegs in round holes. Let’s face it: Not everyone is cut out to be a virtual worker. Not everyone has the personality to work completely alone, apart from the team, nor has the ability to be focused and motivated to do work without the looming presence of a manager over one’s shoulder. Beyond personality types, not everyone has the ability to set up an environment away from the office that is conducive to work. It takes a special type of person and set of skills to navigate sketchy work environments (from distracting households to noisy coffee shops) and still be a consistent contributor to a virtual team.

What to do? Look for self-starters and team members who either have had virtual work experience and done well in that format or are flexible, focused and organized.

2. Lack of a clear process. A successful virtual team relies on a defined vision for desired outcomes and a careful breakdown of how it can accomplish those goals. In some ways, virtual work processes may need to be more rigid than those for co-located teams, with specific systems in place to cover time tracking, milestones, check-ins and knowledge sharing. But at the same time, the process must be flexible enough to accommodate the varied work styles of virtual workers. Ask yourself: Is it more important that work be done on a very specific schedule at a certain time of day or just that it is done on time? Because virtual teams can be dispersed across time zones, there can be distinct advantages to making use  of the asynchronous workflow rather than forcing someone overseas to be up in the wee hours of the morning just to be “at work” at the same time as the rest of the team.

What to do? Map out your workflow and communications processes and be specific about what is set in stone versus what is flexible. Make sure you have the systems in place to capture important data and that let you track workflow, deadlines and output.

3. Weak training techniques. If you’re running a team, you know the importance of “on-boarding” new team members. If you’re embarking on a virtual work process, getting everyone on the same page about how you want the team to work together and how to use the systems you’ve deployed is key. Without a clear explanation and properly conducted training, team output is guaranteed to be inconsistent at best. Because virtual team members don’t have the kind of contact one gets  in an office environment, making sure they have access to effective training materials and have the opportunity to ask questions as needed is important to the success of the team. One weak link can spoil the whole bunch.

What to do? After carefully thinking through your process, develop strong training materials and utilize one of the many tools that work well for knowledge sharing amongst virtual teams such as Mindflash, Knoodle and GoToMeeting. Make these materials available even after the training for reference. Keep lines of communication open for subsequent queries.

4. Failure to capture knowledge. In an office space, you can more readily ferret out the data you need, but in a virtual team environment, the bread crumb trail to data may be more convoluted or harder to track. And even in an office space, knowledge can be dispersed and kept in silos. Multiply that potential ten-fold in a virtual work space. The tools you use to capture information from the team can be helpful, but knowledge sharing starts with having the right attitude.

What to do? Emphasize the importance of knowledge sharing to team members and make sure you provide specific tools and steps to properly capture information from individuals. Everyone on your team must understand the critical nature of documenting and archiving in a shared space, and some helpful virtual work spaces include Glasscubes or Basecamp.

5. No glue to keep it all together. A good virtual team starts with a good leader. Whomever is managing the team needs to have a good grip on the dynamics of virtual work. Whether creating or communicating the vision, the team leader must be able to do so effectively, using tools such as Cohuman and Mavenlink to further a more cohesive team and work process. The team leader must be vigilant, organized and nimble, ready to address issues and fill in gaps to ensure consistent output with an emphasis on documentation and shared knowledge. Without a good leader acting as the glue to holding disparate parts together, communications meltdowns will be the norm, not the exception.

What to do? Find — or be — a smart virtual leader. Know when to be firm and when to be flexible, and be comfortable with being flexible. Keep both the big picture and the detail in mind and use the best technology and tools at your disposal to enhance your ability to do both.

Overall, a successful virtual team includes well-equipped, prepared team members who possess the right personalities and skill sets to understand the process, are on-boarded thoughtfully, and have tools to track work and share knowledge. And someone at the helm who can properly engineer and oil the machine.

Image courtesy stock.xchng user clix

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Sure, there are web conferencing services, such as GoToMeeting, where you can share your desktop, present audio over phone or VoIP, and even push out polls, but what if you want to produce a more media-rich presentation that you can share with your virtual team for training purposes? And archive it? And repurpose it?

Knoodle offers a training solution that provides a presentation with a split screen; you can have text or PowerPoint slides on one side of the screen and video on the other, then sync the video and audio with the slides so they automatically advance at the right time. The Knoodle presentations are more engaging than screencasts or audio slideshows.

You can combine multiple assets — PowerPoint slideshows, video, images and text — and also add also add test quizzes or surveys into your presentations to allow viewers to become active participants in the information exchange. You can capture video as you produce your presentation with your web cam, or opt not to use the video component and just sync up audio.

Once your rich-media presentation is complete, you can share a link to it, export it as an MP4 file and email it, or embed it on your site, your blog, or within your intranet. You can also reuse and repurpose assets you’ve uploaded to create new presentations quickly and easily. As an admin, you can create and manage groups, invite group members,and manage and track who has viewed the presentation you’ve created. You can share the presentations internally (for training your team, for example) or externally (for providing publicly accessible training, demos and educational tools).

Knoodle offers a 30-day free trial. Pricing ranges from $14.99/month to $149.99/month, based on usage and the number of people watching the presentations. You can upgrade or downgrade at any time.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
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Voice and video chat provider Skype is hoping that by making hosting of meetings and web conferences a seamless experience, its product will become more appealing for  business users. Presumably, users will be able to pay for GoToMeeting access with their Skype credit and sign into GoToMeeting using their Skype credentials, or perhaps it will be added to a premium business subscription plan (GoToMeeting currently costs $49 per month). But don’t get too excited about this integration just yet; it’s not expected to actually become available until the fourth quarter of this year.

This may not be the first partnership like this that Skype announces in the coming months. While its userbase is still growing, Skype is coming under increasing competitive pressure from the likes of Google and Apple; gaining a larger foothold in a relatively untapped business market while its competitors continue go after the consumer market may be a smart move.

Photo courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives

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HDFaces will support:

• A video conferencing viewer that’s integrated into the content screen so attendees can collaborate on shared content and see each other at the same time.
• One-click web, audio and video conferencing.
• Video optimization that automatically adjusts to suit the hardware and network each participant is using when video, audio or screen sharing are in use.
• A resizable viewer and layouts, which can be adapted to numerous monitor and projection configurations.
• No specific or proprietary hardware configuration: Any HD-capable video conferencing viewer will be able to support HDFaces.

HDFaces is based on technology originally developed by VidSoft GmbH, a Dresden, Germany-based video conferencing provider, which was recently acquired by Citrix Systems.

A beta version of the product is being previewed today, with commercial availability expected in the first quarter of 2011. The technology will be available at no extra cost to users of GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar and GoToTraining.

Immersive, high quality HD video conferencing has been available for some time for some time via expensive corporate telepresence systems, like those from Cisco. The fact that it’s starting to become more widely available in cheaper teleconferencing tools like GoToMeeting and Skype is great news for those of us who work remotely.

Photo by Flickr user jenny8lee, licensed under CC 2.0.

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Citrix’s GoToMeeting, part of the Citrix Online collaborative suite, is one such service. It also meets one of my other prime requirements — the client is easily installable by users of all levels. One thing that will spoil a web conference before it’s even started is when participants have a hard time installing the local client so they can’t join the conference. This issue can happen to even the most experienced web worker, not just the technology neophyte.

I am sticking with the Mac client for this post, but Citrix also provides a similar user experience and features in the Windows version. Neither client is a permanent install.

Web Workers and Web Conferencing
Today’s web conferencing tools have to be more than just a venue for team meetings — they need to be full collaboration tools to help web workers and their project teams communicate seamlessly.

Citrix GoToMeeting Features

Citrix GoToMeeting for the Mac supports up to 15 conference participants, and includes the following features:

• Screen Sharing. Screen sharing is useful for online demonstrations, collaboration on documents and spreadsheets, and online training. As travel budgets remain tight, screen sharing and some creativity can help geographically dispersed project teams stay in sync on projects.
• Meeting Recording and Playback. Taking meeting minutes is an archaic, mundane, and bureaucratic task, and GoToMeeting includes meeting recording and playback which keeps an audio and screen recording of the entire online meeting. This is a better record, because it spares the misunderstandings and gaps that can sometimes creep into note taking. It is also more efficient for an online team to move to meeting recording because participants can better focus on the meeting. UPDATE: the Mac version of GoToMeeting doesn’t support meeting recording — it’s only available on the Windows version.
• VoIP and Telephone Support. Web conference attendees can dial into the conference via a VoIP or landline phone. Currently, GoToMeeting offers free VoIP and phone conferencing. You also have an option to use your computer’s mic and speakers for conducting audio communications.

Launching meetings takes place within a few clicks, making GoToMeeting an ideal choice for teams that need a web conferencing platform that users of varying levels will have no problem using.

GoToMeeting is available for purchase from GoToMeeting.com. (A free trial is available.) The site includes the latest licensing and pricing information.

Which web conferencing tool do you use?

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Here are some needs virtual teams face daily:

Here is a diagram of what we’re currently using as our solutions and which issues and needs each solution addresses. The software we currently use is in orange. Yellow designates the software we are considering.

Where do we go from here?

It seems that Socialtext and GoToMeeting are the next solutions we should integrate. However, how many more SaaS products will we need to cobble together with our current infrastructure in order to meet immediate and upcoming needs as our team continues to grow? I think it’s better to go with solutions that can meet multiple technology needs. When each solution we adopt only tackles one or two functions, there seems to be no way to avoid a technology patchwork quilt. Is there even a system out there — that we just don’t know about — that can provide us with a completely integrated solution. And if so, can we afford it?

In my mind, adding Socialtext and GoToMeeting will certainly meet some immediate needs, but integrating it will take two things that go beyond me simply adopting and paying for the services:

1. We’ll need to define how the new software fits into our overall process and multiple solutions;
2. We need to somehow encourage adoption from the team.

The latter is a key problem. With all of these disparate solutions brought together to make up our tech infrastructure, we are all suffering information overload. Learning and adopting yet another app seems unbearable.

Next on our plate is a virtual PBX system that can accommodate international team members or at least some stitched together work-around to keep a PBX system affordable for a far-flung team.

What systems and software do you have in place to run your virtual team? What other issues are you facing where you still haven’t found an appropriate solution?

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

The TimeBridge scheduler lets you set up a meeting or conference call by prompting you to pick some ideal date and time options, then sends them to the participants to vote on their best dates and times. It then provides you with a mechanism to accept a mutually agreeable time slot and confirm the meeting with everyone. Now, built right into the scheduler, is a button to “make it a Web conference” or “add a free conference call”.

The web-based conferencing system rivals WebEx and GoToMeeting. It is entirely Flash-based, so it requires zero download, and it seems to be pretty reliable and stable. Its capabilities include:

• share screen — for viewing someone else’s desktop. Perfect for demos.
• share documents — for viewing PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheets and more.
• white board — for collaborative composition. The white board feature also lays over documents for real-time, collaborative annotations.
• co-browse — for the ability to share a web browser view, where any party can click on active links.

Another useful feature is TimeBridge Groups, with which you can group together different configurations of people such as your design group, your executive team and client teams. This feature makes it easier to schedule meetings with pre-designated groupings of people.

So what does the new web conferencing feature cost? The company’s CEO and founder, Yori Nelken, says that TimeBridge can price their new conferencing service competitively because they have no customer acquisition costs. They already have an enormous customer base for their free scheduler, so upgrades are an easy sell. What might cost $50 per month from a competitor is being offered by TimeBridge for $8.95 per month. Of course, when I heard that price, my eyes lit up.

How Web Workers Can Use It

I face several challenge as I’m growing my social media marketing company with web workers in five different locations in the U.S. and a new addition in the UK, including:

• training new hires on the proprietary ways we execute social media marketing tactics
• having virtual meetings with the entire team that can include demos and brainstorming
  
• showing clients in other parts of the world the social media assets we’ve created for them
• demoing samples of our work to potential clients remotely

TimeBridge’s price is attractive for a lean, mean virtual company in startup mode. And it seems like it could provide an immediate functionality and efficiency that is lacking from many virtual teams. I think it is brilliant to build out a suite of “virtual meeting” tools for the new way we’re doing work.

So What’s Missing?

Something that I think would enhance the TimeBridge toolset is the service from TimeDriver that I’ve been using to allow other people to select available time slots on my schedule to set in-person meetings for my time at South by Southwest Interactive. I mentioned this to the folks at TimeBridge, and they acknowledged — somewhat dismissively — that this is something for the future.

If TimeBridge is being touted as a “personal scheduler” with virtual meeting space capabilities, I think the missing piece of the puzzle is just that — personal scheduling. Since part of my web work includes virtual demos and, occasionally, in-person meetups, being able to give people access to open time slots on my calendar and letting them select and book the meetings themselves would be a killer app.

What are you using to schedule meetings? What apps do you use for web conferencing and free conference calls? Are your solutions integrated, and does that matter?

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Palbee homepage

In the fight for dominance in the video web conferencing realm, we have WebEx, the granddaddy who struggles to stay one step ahead of the young fighters such as GoToMeeting. But into the ring leaps Palbee, a scrappy upstart based out of Seoul, Korea who can throw a quick and unexpected left hook that could knock the socks off the competition.

Palbee is leaner than the big guys. And it is cheaper. Much cheaper. While still in beta, it is completely free. Sure, it doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles of the heavy hitters, however, what it lacks in bulk, it makes up for in simplicity. Palbee sought out to be easier to use, and it succeeds.

Set up a free account, log into Palbee, type the title of your meeting, hit start. Voila. You can get a little more complex – but not much more – by opting to record the meeting (click a button), invite other users to your meeting (click a button, type in their Palbee names), and schedule your meeting for another date and time (click a button, enter date and time).

Other quick specs:

• You can have up to 10 people in each meeting.
• There is a limit on meeting time – 1 hour.
• Palbee currently supports JPEGs, GIFs and PowerPoint files.
• Cross platform – runs with a Web browser and Flash.

Palbee Meeting

Now Hear This

Palbee delivers the one two punch with these features:

1. Their whiteboard feature - Every participant can gain access to markup tools including drawing and text functions to make notes on the image or PowerPoint file as it appears on everyone’s desktop. Currently, you have to take a screenshot to save those notations, but brainstorming and collaboration is easy to do.

2. Their conference room embed feature – While I’m not quite sure of the work application here, I was intrigued by the ability to lift some embed code of a Palbee meeting space and paste it into your Web site, blog or even MySpace page. This means that people can click on the Palbee widget and enter the same meeting room. Yes, this also means that if you paste the widget on multiple sites, those become multiple points of entry into the same conference room. So your visitors can engage not only in a live video web conference call or chat with you but also with one another at any time. Freaky!

In the Works

Some of the handy features that will be in a future version of Palbee include:

1. A premium level of services.
2. The ability to save the whiteboard edits.
3. Inviting conferencing guests who are not already registered users of Palbee (registration is free).

Palbee Widget

The company says that Palbee was not initially designed to fit a market need – it was created to fit an internal company need and then they realized it could serve a much wider market.

When I did the demo with the company as part of researching this post, the camera feature did not work for me. The software was not recognizing my Webcam built into my MacBook. There was also the expected delay – I was in Alaska and they were in Seoul, Korea!

If you like Beta products and don’t mind working out the kinks along with the company, Palbee is a handy little tool to meet your next basic Web conferencing needs.

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