Collaboration Tools for our Distributed Startup Team.

Short Story: We use Collanos Workplace and Protonotes for collaborating. Occasionally Dimdim too.

Now, the long story

We had a few preferences for the collaboration tool to use in our startup. Had looked through dozens of them for about 2 weeks before I encountered Collanos Workplace via this WebWorkerDaily post.

We are a bunch of 5 people distributed over 4 places. The requirements we have are these:

1. A place to carry on discussions both synchronously (IM style) as well as asynchronously (email style). The discussions should be persisted so that we have a copy to refer back to. We also wanted the discussions to be topic specific and categorizable.

2. Where we can add our tasks and know who is doing what.

3. Setup meetings and conference.

4. Share documents.

5. Discuss documents.

6. Discuss website wireframes / mockups.

We wanted to pay as less as possible and ideally none to have these features. We also wanted to consolidate as much as possible into one tool instead of signing up for many of them and having content dispersed at lot of places.

Collanos Workplace handles 1, 2, 4 and 5 well for us, is free and pretty perfect for our needs Better than most in my survey and all of these in 1 tool. Setting up meetings was fine but we couldn’t conference well… There is no IM based conferencing and supports only voice. The roundtrip delay in voice communication was lot (20-40 seconds) and annoying, which is understandable given their servers might be far away from India. We are using discussions feature as a workaround for conferencing… it’s not pleasant, but does the work for now. We also occasionally use Dimdim for conferencing.

Collanos Workplace has many other features and is a p2p software implemented in Java. More technical details here.

Wireframes / Mockups :

For requirement no. 6, i.e., to discuss the wireframes, we are using Protonotes, which is simple, free, does it’s work and is a joy to use.

We are making our wireframes using Balsamiq and from the exported PNGs we are creating HTML image maps to add the navigations to the dummy buttons and links. This way, it’s easier to understand how the user interaction flows as against having a bunch of unordered image files. Will be sharing more details about our mockups sometime.

Looking forward to learning what others are using to collaborate. Please share your experience.