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Ask HN: What software do you use for real time remote collaboration?

20 pointskingnothing12 comments

This is an area that I have no knowledge about. The idea of being able to travel around for a year or two to many different locations while running a company appeals to me (and many of you, too, so it seems), but I would need a way to do remote presentations and collaboration with clients in real-time utilizing voice and/or video along with something to allow me to control powerpoint-esque presentations and a shared notepad / whiteboard. Who are the industry leaders in the field for this software? Is there anything open-source available?

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The only ones that will work with non-technical users are things that are simple, and I have tried them all.

1. Adobe connectnow/connectpro. This is brilliant, and allows bi-directional screen sharing which clients love. It's really powerful when training someone to get them to do the training instead of just showing them.

Connectnow is free, and it's only requirement is flash. Couldn't recommend it more.

This can be a problem when the users don't have flash installed, but it is rare. I keep a link to the actual installer exe (some users struggle to download flash the normal way) to send to users that can't use it.

I ask them to go to connectnow.acrobat.com before the presentation and if they can see the begin button they will be fine to view.

Not only is connectnow the best, it's free, but connectpro can scale to thousands of participants if you need it.

2. Others, such as copilot, vnc, glance, beam your screen, webex et al all have a huge number of issues in my experience. We do all our training, support and sales through connectnow exclusively now because it offers the least issues.

3. We use skype if they have it for voice, but more often than not have to call. Voice is cheap regardless.

Thanks - I've been looking for something like this for a while for over the telephone product demonstrations. Had a quick go just now and can't fault it!

I used to lead the development team for Yahoo! Answers, which was split between London, UK and Mission College, CA. Because of the massive time difference (8 hours, or an entire working day), collaboration was hard. We got by with a mix of the following:

- Weekly conference calls via video chat. For those with less budget than Yahoo!, Skype would suffice;

- Adobe Connect with screen sharing and shared chat for tech demos or presentations. It's the easiest to install and seems to work the best on iffy connections;

- Shared collaboration areas (Wikis and mailing lists) to dump things when others are offline;

- IM and IRC for "hi can you look at this?" type questions, or link sharing; and

- Conference calls on the phone for targeted meetings (the productivity cost of a phone call is too high to have it frequently - people can work on their laptops in video conferences if they need to).

Between all these things we just about got by - I'd like to add the voices in the comments saying that face time is still very important. We'd typically fly to Santa Clara once or twice a year for either an entire sprint or for specific architectural/product meetings.

There are several tools that you might try to use to work with your clients remotely. Here are a few that I use when I'm traveling abroad:

- Skype

- Etherpad

- VNC (it's my policy to get clients to install VNC servers on their computers, so they can make an outgoing connection to my computer. This lets me view their exact desktop and review any problems that they might have)

- SSH to my office/development/production environments (you can set up SSH to act as a SOCKS proxy into the remote environment, making it feel as if you were physically there with regards to connectivity and access)

- SocksCap (allows you to transparently wrap any program that connects to remote stuff into the SOCKS protocol - used in conjunction with SSH)

I've found that I can generally service all my client requests and issues via the use of these tools. When something does fail bad, I have a PFY in my city who can get himself to the client very fast to resolve any issues which I cannot fix remotely.

  Answer 1: (Snarky)

I've used IRC & NCSA Collage on my Omnibook 300 since 1995. Daylight readable screen.. runs on AAs, no updates or worms to worry about since most of the code is in ROM. YEAH BABY!

  Answer 2: (Serious)

If you need to see people, hear people, interact with them on a whiteboard, and show them a presentation, that probably implies you'll be doing mucho damage by not being there in person.

It's probably best to figure out ways to win by not collaborating in real-time.. like reviewing and continuing your employees work after they go home but before they start the day because you're in a different time-zone. Think about it - you'll probably have 8 hours to think about things and provide good well-thought out concise answers and ideas that'll get read by fresh minds. That's way better than the interplay you'll get in most real-time meetings. As to presentations, maybe it'd best to find someone that's really skilled in them and have them do the presentations instead while you enjoy traveling?

  Answer 3: (Answering the questions, pandering for upvotes)

http://Etherpad.com is a really nice collaborative notepad with no software to install.

http://Skype.com works great in tons of environments for voice and video.

http://BeamYourScreen.com allows you to show others what you've got on your computer, whether that's PowerPoint or a product demo. It even provides a no-download HTML viewer, and lets you interact if you want.

For remote collaboration w/ voice and video, we use one or more of the following:

Yugma (with Skype): http://www.yugma.com ooVoo: http://www.oovoo.com

These allow for screensharing and audio.

Yugma has a call-in number, so to avoid fees, we use Skype. ooVoo does both screensharing and audio.

Related question: what do people use for active remote collaboration, where you want to interact with someone else's screen?

I was on a team with people located in several places around the US, and my boss wanted us to try pair programming. We tried VNC for a day or two, and after having huge issues with it, we just scrapped pair programming altogether. Are there better solutions out there?

I use intelliadmin (intelliadmin.com) over our wan..very simple and easy to learn and use. There is an 'internet' version also, but it requires installation of software. The lan/wan version doesnt require pre-installation of software on the remote machine.

iChat, or when that bugs out on audio once in a while, Skype. We use iChat for screen sharing and video chat fairly frequently, but we do get together often as well for more in-depth stuff.

We've had 3-4 hour iChats when there was lots of stuff to cover, and it's worked great. Just don't move your mouse while you talk or it'll get choppy... :)

We're all in the same city, but we don't have an office space. So:

- Confluence/Jira for wiki and ticket tracking

- Spark jabber server for chat

- I record demos with Screenflow to share with the other team members

We do meet face to face once a week. We don't have much use for video chat.

Another option you may want to check out is expresswayvideo.com. This is flash-based video, audio and text chat software. The interface is made in Adobe Flex, which makes it different than some of the other options listed on this blog. Another nice thing about it is you can buy the license outright, so it is ideal if you are starting a video chat business yourself, or just want to install it on your website with no usage restrictions.

Thanks to everyone for all of the answers. I'll take a look at all of it!

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