It’s hard work to set up and supervise a teleworking team for some projects. In the web content service I run, I need to gather work-from-home writers together and help them work as a team. This is especially important for projects that require group cooperation and interaction, such as an ebook or a multi-authored blog.
One of the advantages of teleworking is that there’s less opportunities for workplace gossip and personality clashes. Most teams approach their communications very matter-of-factly. But I find that this isn’t always the case, especially when members each have very different working styles.
When managing a team of very different people all over the globe, what can you do to keep the team, and the work, from imploding?
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It’s been a good week to be a reviewer of web applications. Earlier this week I got a sneak peek at Staction, yesterday saw the release of Google’s Chrome, and today I get to discuss JOBLOGS.
JOBLOGS is what I would call a collaboration and communication manager, but one specifically designed for service oriented businesses. Encompassing CRM functionality with a private workspace for collaboration, JOBLOGS is a central place for all information related to a specific client, process, or project.
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Collaboration is always a challenge for any team, but when that team is virtual, cloud collaboration presents its own set of organizational and tracking problems. GroupSwim is looking to step into the slot between e-mail correspondence and full-featured robust project management systems ala Basecamp. According to the company, GroupSwim is not for the management of a project but for the collaborative exchanges during the creation of deliverables.
While one of the company’s tag lines is “social collaboration for the enterprise,” I always look at software and apps from the standpoint of the lone Web worker who puts together various virtual teams for projects. Can GroupSwim be useful to distributed Web workers?
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In the world of branding, Web 2.0 companies are clamoring for name originality. Bookgoo is out there in terms of weird names but in terms of applications for collaboration, their technology rocks. The company set out to “empower users to collaborate more effectively.” And you, dear Web worker, get the benefits of their hard work.
Through Bookgoo, you can upload a document (pdf, html, doc, xls, jpg, gif) or URL and opt to make it either private or public. At first, I was envisioning another Scribd. Then I thought it sounded a bit like Backboard, a feedback site I recently reviewed here. But that is where the functionality diverges from both of those sites into a nifty annotating tool for marking up documents in a way that makes Google Docs look a little plain vanilla and some of the online whiteboard apps available seem a bit old school.
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Call me skeptical. Call me cynical. Call me shortsighted. But I just can’t see what the new company Qwaq offers that is different or better than what is already out there. Here’s how the company describes its offering:
Qwaq, Inc. creates virtual spaces for real work. The company’s product, Qwaq Forums, is the leading secure virtual workspace application for the enterprise, and enables collaboration in ways that weren’t possible before. Designed for enterprises and groups with distributed teams, Qwaq Forums significantly increases productivity by bringing critical resources together in virtual spaces, and allowing people to work together as if they were in the same physical location.
Can someone say “Second Life?” or any other virtual world or virtual world application already out there?
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
