Skype: The ultimate collaboration tool?

(Credit: Matt Asay)

At Alfresco, we've stumbled upon an ingenious way to keep the company together. We're highly distributed, with no US offices. With everyone working remotely, people can feel a bit isolated at times.

I read in Businessweek months ago about how IBM requires remote workers to congregate (online, over-the-phone, or in-person) every three days to improve happiness and productivity. In trying to figure out how to apply this practice to Alfresco, I thought of Skype.

Being a company with employees spread across the United States and Europe, Alfresco has long used Skype to cut phone costs and as our common instant messaging platform. But with a recent update from Skype, "public chats" have been enabled, giving us one more tool.

Basically, this means that we have group chat rooms that are always open. People come and go, participating or not. In so doing, the team has been knit together as we socialize over Skype and work over Skype.

We now have group chats for the management team, for the solutions engineering team, for support, and so on. Often these chats will rest silent, but when a good conversation gets moving, it's invaluable to team cohesion and productivity.

I suspect that it could help even in office environments where everyone sits near each other. I'd be interested to find out if it works as well for you as it has for us.

[eduardgrebe]

IRC seems a better solution to me...

[ShaunRConnolly]

At Ringside Networks, we use USteam + Skype for our daily team standups and ad-hoc whiteboarding discussions. UStream is great for when you have some but not all team members in a given room; enables those not present to be a part of things and you can record things so people can view later.

Brian Robinson posted a good blog entitled OpenSource++ that covers why UStream fits perfectly with our open source culture:
http://robinsontechnology.com/blog/2008/05/28/opensource/

We also use IRC for general team chat.

[blabtech]

Skype seems to be something more and more people are using everyday...

http://blabtech.blogspot.com

[hopnung]

The use of Skype is fairly prevalent within the company that I work for. I was hesitant at first to the "vulnerability" of being able to be contacted at any time by anyone, but it has since proven beneficial to myself. One day I required assistance from a member of our financial team, which is based in London (I'm based in Massachusetts), and it was great to use the SkypeIn feature for serious communications, while the simple IM feature has been good to make quick follow-ups. Otherwise, my company has offices located all over the world and Skype has been the tool that has made it easier to maintain communications.

[ja-watson]

In a column about "open source", why would you write an endorsement of Skype, the ultimate closed-source program? They refuse to interoperate with other standards-based video, audio or even text chat programs.

Why, also, would you make a company dependent on a program that is provided with absolutely no customer support or technical support whatsoever, has billing policies and procedures which are nothing short of bizarre, and is well known for regional and even world-wide service outages which last anywhere from a few hours to several days?

[Matt Asay]

Because it works. And because just because something is proprietary isn't a reason to not use it, unless there's an equal or better open-source equivalent. I use Adium because it's better. But I've yet to find a good replacement for Skype.

[cinnion]

Like ja-watson, I find it odd to see something as closed as Skype in this column. As has been said, it does not support published standards such as SIP and H.323. I don't know about Adium yet, but would have to give Ekiga (http://www.ekiga.org) a two thumbs up on what I have seen of it so far. Besides being ported to M$, it even communicates with other programs on all sorts of *NIX versions, M$, and Macs, and can communicate with a VoIP PBX such as Asterix (http://www.asterisk.org).