Technology has made it easier than ever to telecommute or work with remote teams. At b5media, we have people working from around the world, and have tried and used dozens of tools to make that work go smoother.

Everyday, there are new tools that show promise, but many are tried once and forgotten about. Some are clunky or get in the way of collaboration. Others are a solution in need of a problem. Here are some of the best ones that have gone past the trial, and turned into must-have tools that we use every day.

Skype
www.skype.com
Cost: free
Skype is best known as a telephone replacement. Sure, being able to make free skype calls anywhere in the world is nice, but that isn’t the real killer app from a collaboration perspective. The best kept secret about Skype is its use in Instant Messaging. Just like Messenger, AIM, or Google Talk, you can create a text chat bewteen people. You can even create a group chat within your team. The one feature you won’t find elsewhere though, is the ability to bookmark these conversations. This means that if someone is offline, when they return they will see the entire conversation they have missed and are able to catch up. With a team spread over multiple timezones, this is really useful, and you never have to worry about being left out of the conversation because you happen to be offline at the time.

Tokbox
www.tokbox.com
Cost: free
Video conference calls add that human touch to a remote team. If everyone has a webcam installed, Tokbox is a really elegant interface to show a “Brady Bunch” style display of your team during a meeting. We’ve used it with up to 6 people, but in theory, you could have many more. With folks scattered around the continent, being able to talk with them face-to-face makes a big difference! We don’t use this for every call, but from time to time it’s really nice to remind us all that we’re all people working as a team.

Teamspeak
www.teamspeak.com
Cost: free
Skype is great for a short, purpose driven call, but Teamspeak turns voice chat into more of a virtual office. It is client/server software, which means you need hosting, but most Internet companies already have access to servers with extra capacity. Load up the server and you can now have a “push-to-talk” style conversation with your whole team. Have the team hanging out in a Teamspeak channel, and hitting a button is the virtual equivalent to poking your head over the cubicle wall for a quick question. It allows those quick, informal, water-cooler conversations to happen despite the distance. Since it’s a push-to-talk setup, you won’t be burning up bandwidth having a skype call active all day with mostly silence.

Yugma
www.yugma.com
Cost: free
There are many desktop-sharing applications out there, but the good ones like WebEx or GoToMeeting cost a lot of money. Yugma is a free solution with all the features of the commercial solutions, including multiple viewers, and both Windows and Mac compatibility. A software download is only needed for the host, not for clients. Desktop sharing is useful for everything from viewing a powerpoint presentation to having several people doing a code review. One person hosts the meeting, and shares his screen, and everyone else can see, in real-time, what is on that screen. Combined with Teamspeak or a Skype call, and you can really see what we’re talking about.

Google docs
http://docs.google.com/
Cost: free
Google Docs are a great, free way of maintaining your documents or spreadsheets without using Microsoft Office, however there is also a huge advantage to having documents existing online in the cloud instead of within an application on one computer. Collaboration with Google Docs, specifically Google Spreadsheets, is as easy as inviting others to the document. If two (or 5.. or 50) people open a spreadsheet at the same time, they can all edit individual cells and others will see their changes immediately. If your team needs a common checklist, or you need to get information from many people, this is the easiest and most real-time way of setting this up. Google Documents can also have multiple people editing, but the experience isn’t as slick as the cell-locking based system in Spreadsheets.

These are the five that we use and have stuck with over time. There are many others that we have tried, and haven’t found as useful, but other organizations may. Which tools do you use within your work environment?

Yesterday, we at b5media launched the third of our unique look at the blogs within our channels.  Splendicity is a new portal which pulls content from over 70 Beauty & Style blogs within the network, and pulls it all into a customized Wordpress instance.  This follows on the launch of Bizzia last week to highlight our Business content, and Starked which highlights our Entertainment and Music blogs.  Yes, it’s been a busy month on the team!

Adding in some custom plugins built by Mike Schinkel, and a slick theme created by Todd Henwood and Bill Erickson, we’ve created a really cool site with all of the features you would expect from a mainstream site.  The best part about it, is that it’s all built on top of a Wordpress base.  Taking advantage of the ability to extend the Wordpress code using plugins and custom themes, we’ve created the ability for the editors to pull the best content from the blogs within those channels and present it in a way that can drive traffic and create a more mainstream audience.

That is the next great frontier for Wordpress.  In the coming weeks, Wordpress 2.7 will be released which is a huge refinement of an already robust product.  With this release, Wordpress graduates from the realm of the geeky blogger, into a mainstream content tool. 

When sites like these portals, or mainstream news and magazine sites like my last project, Green Living Online, have the tools the Wordpress provides, anything is possible!  When I look back on some of the large media sites I have built in the past (like TSN and DiscoveryChannel), there aren’t many (any?) features needed that couldn’t be provided within Wordpress. 

I’m not suggesting that the folks at CTV should be rebuilding their tools from scratch, but for people out there looking to create competing products, you’d be hard-pressed to find a tool that provides all of the functionality, and the support community that is found here.

This past week, the technology team at b5media threw on the afterburners to get us moved onto an entirely new infrastructure.  After months of planning and investigating a dozen hosting providers, we have finally flipped the switch on the next phase of growth.

Having outgrown our previous datacenter and infrastructure, we have moved to brand new servers located at ServerBeach.  We have taken a different philosophical approach to our infrastructure than we have in the past to allow for future growth.  Rather than custom purpose-built servers we had in our old datacenter, we have moved to plain vanilla commodity servers, which are inexpensive and easily replicated as we grow. 

By moving to more vanilla servers, we are actually decreasing the power of each machine.  Although these machines use newer, faster processors, they are not the high-end quad core ones we had in our old infrastructure.  By sacrificing a bit of power, we save a lot in costs.  To compensate for this, we have employed more machines… almost twice as many.  Without touching anything else, this change alone would have a significant impact to our speed.

We are transitioning away from an NFS mounted shared filesystem to a local filesystem.  Now, our web pages are loaded from a local hard drive instead of a network mapped drive.   This change too, on its own, would give us a huge performance boost.

In order to remove NFS from the infrastructure, we needed a different solution for Wordpress caching.  In the past, we were using a combination of WP-Cache and WP-SuperCache which create static files to be served.  We have now rolled out batcache to our sites, which uses memcached to store the blog information.  Again, this change has had a massive impact to our speed.  Initial tests show the performance of batcache to be phenomenal!

We have replaced our hardware-based load balancer to the software-based nginx load balancer.  This allows us to keep to our philosophy of using commodity hardware, while being ridiculously fast.

When you put all of it together, these changes will make our new infrastructure faster and much more robust.   It also lays the foundation to continue to scale out by adding additional machines as needed.  And this is only the first phase with more changes to come! 

Huge kudos to the team for pulling off an extremely complex migration in an unexpectedly short period of time.  The entire team contributed in some way, and especially Lee and Brian plowed through challenge after challenge during the move.  Awesome work!  You guys rock!

The last year and a half has been a wonderfully exciting and eye-opening experience into the world of “Green”. When Green Living Enterprises realized that they had an opportunity to have a real content-rich website instead of their “About Us” site, they jumped on it with both feet. The Green Living Online team was able to design and launch this new site in a short 2 months, by using a Wordpress backend, and the site has grown in leaps and bounds ever since.

During that time, I found myself surrounded by some of the most driven and passionate people I have known. Margaret, Kim, Lee, Chris, Christine, Vel, and the rest of the gang, it has been a blast working with you! I’m expecting some big things out of you guys, and I’ll certainly be watching!

But now, the time has come for me to move on. So what’s next for me?

In the next few weeks, I’ll be joining b5media, a global network of 340 professional blogs, covering diverse topics such as TV shows and Business, and everything in between. They are looking to continue to grow quickly, although they are currently hitting over 10 million uniques per month. I’ll get to work with some of the best minds in the blogging world, and build the business along with them. This is a really cool opportunity with a great team!

To the gang at Green Living, I’m really going to miss working with you. To the gang at b5media, I can’t wait to dive in!