Communication is key...

When teams are geographically dispersed, communication is key to a successful operation. When we talk about communication, we don't mean email. Email is an interrupt and a time-waster. You have to learn to manage email, and one of the keys is to be prepared to ignore it for long periods. That's a topic for another post, though.

Real time communications are key. Your team members need to have access to each other whenever tasks are being performed. It may be early in the morning or late at night. The reality, though, is that having at least two people on a task makes the task go easier, so communication is key.

Here, we use OpenFire, a Jabber based server, to facilitate instant messaging. OpenFire allows both individual and group based chats. Getting instant feedback on questions is invaluable, and using OpenFire gives you just that.

If you don't want to go to all the trouble of putting up your own Jabber server, Google Talk is a great alternative. It's free, works from a web client, does voice, and has Google-level reliability. It also works great with Pidgin, a cross platform, open source client.