I’ve been long time working from home, first I was living in Holland and afterwards I moved to Thailand for a while.
To keep communication between the development team was really important and to have the right tools for these even more.
I will not talk about the good things of working from home or the bad things, at the end what I choose is to work from home and often in the client. I like it more.
About the tools that I use, they needed to have few things in common, for free, powerful and we based.
Sharing document: GoogleDocs
Right now almost every body knows about Google Docs, but did you ever use it as a tool of sharing document for editing them? is wonderful
Upload files from other suites, edit them online, save them, see who edit them, historical revisions….and many more…
Shared Calendar: GoogleCalendar
Web calendar that can be shared over an amount of users. Create alerts with SMS or email…
Project administration: Project2Manage
Web based project administrator, works great and is for free. Set your milestones, set tasks assign them….
Brainstorming: Bubbl
For brainstorming, we have this great tool. Invite people to join one board and let’s the party started! amazing tool
Shared Board: Dabbleboard
Great application to shared a board for writting in, whatever is in your mind. My nephew loves this one 😉
Sharing Diagrams: Gliffy
For this kind of work I normally use DIA, or the MySql WorkBench, but if you are far from your pc or you need to share the diagram, it may be the perfect solution.
Version Control: GitHub
I use SVN in a private server. But I’ve tried the free version of Git Hub and rocks! just one advice, if you use the free version the code would be public.
Conferene: Skype
I know is not an online application but I still couldn’t find a good one. Any idea?
And of course thing that they would never let you down: email, ftp, phone call…
Extra stuff (that you need to install in your server and is for free):
Update:
- Mockingbird, perfect to draw stories or mock web sites!
- Dropbox, folder in the cloud, with backups file sync sharing tools….perfect!