One of the hurdles of working with others at a distance is getting information from one place to another in a timely, efficient and – above all – accurate and useful manner. Let’s look at a few of the most common ways people get information from one place to another.
Email – productivity@large.tld
PRO: Everyone’s got it, nearly everyone knows how to use it without being inconvenienced by an explanation.
CON: File size limits, asynchronicity (in a bad way) and a lack of centralization make email less than completely useful.
SECRET USE: When you’re using other solutions (like those discussed below), using email to create a “canonical version” of a file or data set can be very handy. Few things keep records as well as the transactional-nature of email; so the next time you hit “Major Revision” status on a document or set of information, email a copy with notation to your collaborators. This will help the group understand where the work is at, and keep milestones in sight.
Online Documents – Google Docs, Docs.com and more
PRO: Not every computer has office software – not every computer is capable of installing software that’s fully compatible with every other computer. Moving some of your document-based work to the web is an easy way to
CON: Working on a Photoshop file, a PHP-based website, or any other less-than-common file formats? Online documents can’t handle most of these in a useful way.
SECRET USE: If you’ve got a document that needs to be kept in a central place to avoid forking (splintering of versions), or one that has a large number of contributors who may work across many work groups, online documents may be the way to go for planning, scheduling and other coordination-level tasks. Keeping everyone on the same page – if not in the same file folder – is a powerful bonus to collaboration.
Remote File Sharing
PRO: Ready, distributed access to non-standard, large, or otherwise comberson (read as: sensitive or secret) documents and files.
CON: Even using systems with file versioning, who-edited-what-last can become a difficult thing to sort out.
SECRET USE: We thought you’d never ask!
A MWYW team favourite – remote file sharing services, such as Dropbox, allow for entire systems of information to be shared between as many people as are needed. From full-on web development projects, to stacks of spreadsheets – anything that goes into your local folder using one of these systems, is mirrored change-for-change online, and on your collaborators’ machines.
While the lack of built-in milestone tracking and the absence of a communication method built into this kind of service may seem like a weakness, there are some great ways to get around that – which really can be applied to each of these three collaborative tools in different ways.
For any online collaboration, make the most of data sharing by:
- … building a standard method with your team for marking achievements, milestones and deliverables;
- … keeping a record of past activities, so you know where you’ve come from (it helps when planning where to go);
- … and build a task management architecture that allows everyone in the group to know where they are in the project’s cycle.
We’re going to talk about task management next – however, making sure you have an infrastructure for collaboration that’s appropriate to the nature of your team’s shared goals is quite important.