Zcope: Collaboration and Project Management Combined: Online Collaboration«

Zcope may have a slightly silly name (apparently it’s pronounced“Scope”), but it’s a collaboration and project management tool with plenty of potential and some useful features.

Like competing project management web apps in this space, such asBasecampandproducteev, Zcope provides the ability to manage tasks and offers an online space to share documents with your team. It’s nicely designed, but what makes Zcope stand out is that it has more complex and useful project management features than is found in many competing apps. Rather than just being able to assign tasks and due dates, for example, you can assign costs to users and track time using the app, so you can see whether your projects are proceeding to budget.

You set up Zcope so that it’s accessed via a specific subdomain, so you can set up yourcompany.zcope-engine.com to share with anyone you need to access your project management platform. Adding other users to the app is straightforward so you can share project data with all the stakeholders who might be interested. Usefully, it has privacy controls: confidential tasks and milestones can be set as“for internal use only,” which means they won’t be seen by customers or others.

One interesting feature is the ability to create project blog posts. It’s not a particularly fancy CMS, but blog posts can be linked to tasks and/or milestones, which could make for a useful collaboration tool to help keep everyone informed of progress on specific tasks and issues.

Zcope does have a few quirks. It’s a German app that’s been translated into English; some of the copy on the site reads a little strangely, and it uses commas instead of periods for the decimal mark. That quirkiness, coupled with the fact it has some  more complex project management features, could be somewhat off-putting and make the app a little tricky to figure out. However, despite this, I found it pretty easy to use (it also has a useful FAQ and documentation page). If you’re looking for a solid collaboration tool with features like costs and budget management, it’s worth checking out.Various plansare available depending on the number of users and amount of storage space required; a 30-day free trial is available.

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Don’t Forget to Thank Remote Team Members: Online Collaboration«

Too often, out of sight can mean out of mind when you have team members spread out in various offices around the world. Even those of us with the best intentions sometimes forget to thank people or recognize them for doing great work. It’s easy to forget when we get busy, but it’s too important to neglect, especially when you’re talking about your remote employees.  It only takes a minute to say“thank you” or“well done,” and here are some ideas for how you can fit recognition into your regular work routines.

• Immediate recognition.Try to get in the habit of immediately recognizing people when they do good work or provide you with some extra help (Georgina suggested someways to show recognition and praise here). A quick reply with genuine appreciation for doing a great job is a good place to start, and you can do this over email, instant messaging, phone or with a handwritten note. Be as specific as possible when you thank someone, and include something about why you appreciated their work. Just replying with“Thank you” is nice, but it isn’t very personal and can sometimes seem insincere.
• Set reminders.I know this sounds over the top, but it can help to set a reminder on your calendar every day or once a week to spend just five minutes thinking about your team and their work. This gives you time to reflect on how people are doing and remind you to recognize good work. On the flip side, it also gives you time to think about how you can provide helpful feedback for employees who might not quite be on the right track with a project.
• Staff meetings.I once had a manager who built time into her staff meetings where team members were encouraged to thank other members who had done something particularly awesome that week. This is a good way to make sure recognition isn’t just coming from the manager. Staff meetings are also a great place to provide public recognition or awards for employees, so don’t forget to think about recognition when putting together staff agendas.
• Rewards.Don’t forget to go beyond a simple verbal“thank you” when someone does something truly outstanding. A gift certificate or small bonus in addition to some public recognition are great ways to reward a team or individual for a job well done. For remote employees, make sure that you think carefully about rewards, since even gift certificates for major online retailers, likeAmazon.com, can’t always be used in every country. This is where getting to know your team members’ preferences can really help, and giving a gift certificate to a favorite restaurant can be a really personal way to recognize someone.
• Celebrations.Most teams try to get everyone together in person at least occasionally. If you can time those meetings to occur shortly after some big milestone for the team (a big release or deliverable), you can use this valuable in person time to celebrate both team accomplishments and provide individual recognition in person. However, recognition is best when made as close as possible to the work being completed, so don’t withhold recognition until you meet in person.

What are your tips for recognizing remote employees?

Photo by Steven Depoloused under the Creative CommonsAttribution 2.0 Genericlicense.

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What Do Telecommuters Look for in Employers?: Online Collaboration«

There are plenty of workers these days who only look for telecommuting positions, and those who’ve worked on a virtual basis before often have some very specific ideas about what they want to see in an employer.

Knowing what those expectations are and how to manage them can be very useful for an organization interested in working with a distributed staff.

An Employee, Like Any Other

Most telecommuters have an expectation that you’ll treat them like other employees in your business. They want to have access to the same benefits you offer to people working in the office, such as health insurance. There may be benefits that simply aren’t applicable (such as reimbursement for any public transportation used to get to work) that you may not need to find an equivalent for your telecommuters. It’s arguable, after all, that telecommuting itself may be a benefit.

Additionally, many telecommuters want to be considered employees, rather than contractors. That means you remain responsible for payroll taxes, insurance and the other bits and pieces of a compensation package.

Managing Unusual Technical Requirements

While the average telecommuting employee probably has a computer and an Internet connection already set up at home, their equipment simply may not be up to the requirements of your organization. It’s not unusual for such employees to expect employers to pay for any technology above and beyond what they would normally provide for themselves. If, for instance, there’s a specific piece of software that your employees absolutely have to have, you’ll be expected to pay for the license for your telecommuters’ computers. Similarly, the cost of a high-speed Internet connection may come out of your pocket, rather than your employees’.

There are some organizations that expect their telecommuting employees to work on their own hardware, but it can actually be a better choice for the employer to provide computers and other equipment for all telecommuting employees. It’s not an unexpected expense— after all, you would be paying for computers for your employees if they were based in the office — and it’s easier to retain control and ensure that key software packages will run smoothly if you know what everyone is working on. Furthermore, a telecommuter may consider haggling over relatively small expenses like a new computer with an employer to be a bad sign.

Extremely Clear Communication

Throughout the application and hiring process, a good telecommuter will be paying attention to how you and your organization communicate. If there’s information that doesn’t get passed along or miscommunications because people aren’t talking face-to-face, it’s not out of the question for a telecommuter to go back to job hunting. Since such employees aren’t in your office, it’s especially important for communications to be clear. Evidence that isn’t the case can make a telecommuting employee think twice about just how easy it will be to work with your company.

PhotocourtesyFlickr userJessamyn West

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ClipUpload: Easily Share Your Clipboard: Online Collaboration«

Ever thought how neat it would be if you could quickly upload whatever was on your clipboard to a server somewhere, either to share with your team or to save for later use? That’s exactly whatClipUploaddoes. It’s an open-source Windows utility that makes sharing the contents of your clipboard a snap. It’s designed to upload your clippings to an FTP server, but if you don’t have easy access to one, or you don’t want to use FTP, it can also upload toImgur(for images) andPastebin(for text and code snippets).

ClipUpload sits in your system tray. You  configure it by clicking on the icon, which brings up a window that enables you enter your FTP settings (if you wish to use FTP); you can also set Pastebin and Imgur upload options here and see a log of uploaded files. To upload the contents of your clipboard, just right-click on the icon, whichpresents you with a context menu giving you upload options: FTP and either Imgur or Pastebin, as appropriate. Once uploaded, ClipUpload places a link to the uploaded file in your clipboard, which then makes it easy to share the file with your colleagues.

I can imagine ClipUpload being very useful for members of distributed teams, particularly for research tasks. By uploading clippings to a shared FTP directory or to a specific Pastebin subdomain (which can be specified in ClipUpload’s settings), team members can quickly and easily share snippets of text, URLs and images from a central repository. Additionally, you could combine ClipUpload with a clipboard management app likeDitto(see my review here) to have a clipboard that can store multiple items and then upload any of them to a sever in just a couple of clicks.

ClipUpload can bedownloaded from Sourceforge. It’s a portable app, so it doesn’t need to be installed.

Disclosure: True Ventures is an investor in Ditto, as well as in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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How I Back Up My Gmail Account: Online Collaboration«

In the wake of Googleaccidentally deleting some people’s Gmail accounts over the weekend, I thought I’d share my Gmail backup method. While Google hasapparently nearly restored all of those missing accounts, now’s a good time to review your own backup plans— how would you feel if you suddenly lost access to your email?

I mentioned inmy post earlier this weekthat its a good idea to have a local backup of any critical data that resides on cloud services. The app I use for Gmail backup is calledMailStore Home, a free Windows email archiving tool thatKevin wrote about a few years ago. It makes storing a local copy of Gmail emails a snap, and it doesn’t just work with Gmail, either. Out of the box, MailStore can archive email from a range of desktop and web-based email applications, including Windows Mail, Exchange, Thunderbird, Gmail and Hotmail. It also supports POP and IMAP, so should be able to store email from accounts you have pretty much anywhere.

Setting it up to work with Gmail is just a matter of giving it your email address and password. By default, it will archive all of your mail, except for spam and trash, but you can also decide to include or exclude email with particular labels or emails from certain a date range.

Once MailStore has archived all the email from the account (a process that will likely take quite a while the first time it runs, depending on the volume of mail there is to archive), you can use the MailStore app to browse the archive and search for email. If your Gmail account disappears, you can then use the archive to restore your email.

The email is actually stored in local database, which could easily be wiped out by a hard drive failure, so to make doubly sure my emails are safe, I also occasionally make a backup of the archive. MailStore makes this pretty easy: there are home page options to back up to an external hard drive or DVD.

Fortunately, I’ve never had to restore my emails from my archive. But I feel much more comfortable knowing I have a local copy.

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Web Conferencing Coming to Skype With GoToMeeting Integration: Online Collaboration«

Thanks to a partnership announced Tuesday with Citrix Online,Skypeusers will get web conferencing functionality later this year. By making use of Citrix’s popularGoToMeetingconferencing product, Skype users will be able to easily quickly set up online meetings with an audio conferencing bridge that enables users to join via Skype or through public switched telephone network (PSTN) phone numbers. Web conferences will make use of Skype’sSILKcodec for high-quality audio, and will also enable annotated screensharing.

Voice and video chat provider Skype is hoping that by making hosting of meetings and web conferences a seamless experience, its product will become more appealing for  business users. Presumably, users will be able to pay for GoToMeeting access with their Skype credit and sign into GoToMeeting using their Skype credentials, or perhaps it will be added to a premium business subscription plan (GoToMeeting currently costs $49 per month). But don’t get too excited about this integration just yet; it’s not expected to actually become available until the fourth quarter of this year.

This may not be the first partnership like this that Skype announces in the coming months. While itsuserbase is still growing, Skype is coming under increasing competitive pressure from the likes of Google and Apple; gaining a larger foothold in a relatively untapped business market while its competitors continue go after the consumer market may be a smart move.

PhotocourtesySeattle Municipal Archives

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Keep Everyone on the Same Page With a Newsletter: Online Collaboration«

Some newsletters that I receive, though ostensibly marketing material, deliver great value. Newsletters can provide even more value when provided to the members of a distributed team.

It’s hard to keep remote workers on the same page when it comes to the state of their field or industry; a newsletter can help to ensure that distributed teams at least share some common footing and run into fewer knowledge gaps.

Here are some tips to help your newsletter provide real value for your team.

Learn From the Best

I may not be talking about the kind of newsletters that companies send to their customers in this article, but that doesn’t mean the best of those kinds of publications can’t inform the creation of great internal newsletters. To that end, I urge anyone reading this to check out both theSprouterweekly newsletter andGdgt‘s recurring missive to members of the site, which doesn’t follow a schedule, but somehow always seems to hit my inbox at just the right time.

Despite having very different formats and focusing on completely different areas, both Sprouter’s and Gdgt’s newsletters share at least one thing in common: providing information that, although related to the core business of each company, isn’t presented as a sales pitch or with a specific marketing slant. Obviously, with a newsletter targeted at keeping a distributed team up to speed on pertinent developments, information is the whole point. But how you choose to convey that information can take very different forms.

Sprouter takes a more scattershot approach. It provides a variety of different material, with a founder profile, a list of hot startups, a list of upcoming events, and a selection of outgoing links to awesome blog posts related to the startup economy from around the web, as chosen by both Sprouter staff and members of its user community. Each item is accompanied by a brief description, and a link to the full piece or site if you’re interested in finding out more. If you wanted to make team involvement a key aspect of your newsletter, this is a great model. You could include story submissions from each team member, so that pieces that are important to your employees are the ones everyone is reading. It also provides team leaders with an informal way of seeing what everyone is interested in.

Gdgt takes a much more focused approach, but one that feels just as useful. Generally speaking, the Gdgt newsletter features a single lengthy article by the site’s co-founders Ryan Block and Peter Rojas, dealing with a hot topic in the gadget-sphere. For example, the Feb. 10 edition contained a long rumination on the situation at Nokia following Stephen Elop’s memo regarding the company’s“burning platform.” Your team leader or a key internal stakeholder could provide a single central piece for each edition, articulating the next major project milestone in detail, for example, or talking about a recent external development that has a significant impact on what the team is working on.

Focus on the News in Your Newsletter

While I realize you may be excited about your company’s latest achievements, that’s not necessarily the best thing to put in a newsletter. Too often, internal newsletters are packed with corporate boosterism, which can put off team members and negatively affect worthwhile engagement.

Instead, focus on what’s changed or new that’s relevant to your team. Don’t think of it like an interim project report, stating progress towards milestones, budget updates, etc. Instead, talk frankly about non-measurable and contextual concerns that won’t get surfaced in more traditional reporting tools. This is your team you’re talking to, not clients or even stakeholders; a newsletter is the perfect place to address things that might otherwise fall through the cracks during normal daily interaction or in other documents. Think specifically about what might be news to your team members since the last time you had a team-wide check-in.

Distributed teams face communication challenges that technology is making easier and easier to overcome, but the form of communication many teams choose to use can leave huge knowledge gaps between members. IM and traditional email exchanges are often too ephemeral, and not inclusive. A newsletter provides a chance for reflection, idea collection and archiving, and a chance for all to step back and look at things from a contemplative distance, all with relatively little time and input.

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