Rolling your own online office

I've done a lot of telecommuting in my life. My first real writing gig came when I was 16 as a freelancer for a computer magazine whose offices were 3,000 miles from my house, and since then I've worked for a number of blogs, web startups, and computer game companies in an online, virtual office environment. During that time I've found that the key to a successful distributed team is communication. The difference between the ventures that failed and those that succeeded was how well set up the communication structure was for the team.

And then Josh Catone proceeds to describe exactly how to do this, using mostly free tools.

Read/Write Web: Rolling Your Own Online Office (June 12, 2007)

Free web conferencing with Vyew

If you’re looking for free/extremely low-cost alternatives to online conferencing tools like WebEx, let me suggest Vyew.

Vyew is a next-generation online collaboration and web conferencing service that brings people and content together. With Vyew you can host LIVE conferences and work collaboratively on content asynchronously over time, ANYTIME.

Inside Vyew you can author new content and collaborate with PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and PDF files, plus audio, video and images. You can also stream live or capture what’s showing on your desktop. Built-in text chat and FREE teleconferencing make live collaboration sessions highly productive.

Basic Vyew accounts are free (and advertising-supported; in other words, ads appear in your online session window.) “Professional” accounts start as low as $9.95 per month.

Media Convert

Carrie has found a very useful online file conversion tool, Media Convert, which she has posted about over at Knowledge Work.