There’s a lot of excitement lately about wikis. Wikis are an amazing tool, but the hype can lead some to think that simply installing a wiki and letting people do what they want with it will be effective. I fell for the hype and installed a wiki for my team to use. But my wiki was ignored by pretty much everyone, and fell into disuse. Recently, I relaunched the wiki concept within my team, this time successfully. What changed?

Skype reduces an micro-multinationals phone bills to a very large extent. But if someone isn't at their computer, you still have to call them (and pay for the international call).

Voipbuster is a web-based service that solves this problem.

Usability testing is no longer something that happens in an expensive lab. Digital webcams and screen-recording software have made it possible to do usability testing with almost zero infrastructure (using software like morae, which essentially replaces a conventional usability lab). Joel Spolsky has written a nice article describing the experience the copilots had usability testing their latest product.

But conventional wisdom still says that usability something is to be done by specialists, as a structured project that generates a report. While this is often a good idea, it's not always the right approach, for the following reasons:

Skype journal published a nice roundup of the best skype plugins. Pamela (an anwering machine / recording plugin) tops the list. Video4IM (a video conferencing utility) and Jyve (a call forwarding / presence engine) are also mentioned. But the biggest surprise is Jybe, a browser-sharing application. Given that you can open MS Office documents inside your browser, this could be an extremely powerful piece of collaboration software that gives companies like Sabeer Bhatia's InstaColl a run for their money.

Looks like video conferencing and screensharing technologies are only getting better. Cool!

Robin Good has an excellent presentation about free / low-cost collaboration tools. He frames them as "Grassroots collaboration tools", in opposition to "Enterprise Collaboration Tools" like Webex that have been around for years. He sees the primary value of these tools being price, features, and usability (i.e. usable by non-technical people). Anyone interested in the space should watch the presentation...it's that good.
Below is a list of the product categories and products in the "GrassRoots Collaboration Tools" space. Most of the tools are from Robin's presentation, with edits and additions by me. This list will change over time as new tools come to market.. feel free to suggest options that are missing from the list in the comments section below.

This is big news. Collabnet are the guys behind the excellent subversion source control system. The (very pricy) CollabNet collaboration platform has always seemed a tough sell to me. Moving to a salesforce.com-style business model could be a big win for them.

Rashmi Sinha has a nice entry about Joel's new CoPilot product. She points out that building a UI with excellent usability on top of an open-source core that already exists is at the heart of the project's strategy.

Last week I wrote about the coming boom in collaboration tools. It looks like Joel Spolsky is thinking along the same lines

Until recently, the collaboration tools that I use to communicate with my crew have had one critical failing: none of the free screen sharing options on the market can be used with any kind of reliability.

At Uzanto we use a Project Management technique called SCRUM.

It’s basically a short team meeting every day where each team member says
1) What they’ve done since the last meeting
2) What they plan on doing since the next meeting
3) Any roadblocks or dependencies that are holding them up

Om Malik has a nice piece on the growning backlash against Skypes apparently lousy billing / customer service. Skype (the organization) is obviously experiencing some growing pains.

I use Skype 2-3 hours a day to talk to people halfway around the world, and I've never paid them a dime, so I can't complain myself. However, I have noticed a distinct drop in audio quality since the latest release of the Skype client. In particular, the volume of the call will sometimes sporadically drop almost to 0. Is Skype (the technology) also experiencing growing pains?

Working closely with people that aren’t in the same physical space is never easy: much communication is nonverbal, and not being able to read body language and facial expression data means that everybody has to work hard to prevent misunderstandings. That hard work slows down communication. The tools for supporting this kind of work ARE improving every day, however.