GeekNotes: Remote Collaboration from a Home Office

Today, a colleague in private practice asked a very timely question about collaborating from a home office:

My partner and I are looking at expanding our telephone coaching practice and would like to find some screen sharing and collaboration tools…. What are you using these days to coach / consult at a distance?

More and more, our globe-spanning customers need to collaborate from a residence or on the road. They do so to be more productive, to support balance between life and work, to access new markets, and to reduce the number of climate-heating airline flights they are responsible for. While collaboration tools have advanced and become more reliable, some of the basic services – voice, cellphone and Internet connections – are not. Further, today’s executives face many of these IT challenges on their own.

This summer we have conducted remote meetings with clients and colleagues who were participating from their offices and homes in Brazil, France, Switzerland, Canada and the US. We have hosted meetings from our own home office, in hotels, airport lounges and coffee shops, and on occasion, stuck in a rental car. In almost all cases, at least one attendee was relying on residential-grade broadband, Voice over IP (VoIP) or “found” WIFI access, and a few key tools.

If you plan to RELY on remote collaboration, it will take a bit more than the typical home network, but it can be done. Here are some observations about what works for us, in our home office or on the road, when conducting remote business meetings:

Make sure your voice connection is bombproof (or have a plan B)

VoIP. Cellular Phones. Skype. Compared to the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS lines), the new tools of voice communication can be, well, moody. Yes, you can save a bundle. Yes, you have many more features. Yes, you can make phone calls from far-off places. No, you cannot count on them. So what do you do?

• Use a high-quality telephone conference bridge. If all your other technology fails, as long as the voice bridge is up, and you circulated documents ahead of time, the meeting will continue.
• Look for an unlimited monthly plan, with optional per-minute fees for toll-free callers. Don’t over- or under-pay, and see if you can find one that complements your screen-sharing meeting application. Dedicated conference bridges, with live operators and per-minute, per-caller charges for access are very reliable, but in my opinion, overpriced – especially for their toll-free options. Now that almost all business users have near-unlimited long distance calling plans in their region, toll-free numbers are of most use to the traveler dialing from a hotel phone.
• Free bridges make you pay. On the other end of the spectrum, there are now many free conference bridges that are simply awful, in my experience. Skype, Gatherplace and GoToMeeting all bundle a version of freeconferencecall.com as bridges in with their entry-level offering. Meaning no disrespect, I have never had an incident-free meeting with them.
• When we are providing the bridge, we use either AT&T Callvantage for three-way meetings, or GatherPlace Premium for larger ones. Both offer unlimited calling as part of their package for about $40 / month / concurrent meeting.

Consider TWO broadband connections at home – NOT overkill

Our home town, Columbus, Ohio, was an early market for Time Warner’s broadband over Cable. As a result, we are seeing how a cable system ages in a neighborhood, and it isn’t pretty. In fact, over the past 10 years, we’ve seen both Cable and DSL broadband suffer significant disruptions. In 2007, for instance, our business-class cable service was unreliable for 6 months. It was JUST fixed, when our DSL line quit for a week. So unless you can get a new Fiber-Optic connection to your home, there are two reasons to have BOTH a Cable and a DSL connection in your house:

1. When (not if) one service goes down, you can switch to the other.
2. Video, screen-sharing and file downloads can interfere with Voice over IP (VoIP) – and remember, we need a bombproof voice connection.

• Isolate VoIP from other services. We have chosen AT&T’s CallVantage VoIP service because it sounds great, and has great long distance plans. Still, we put the adapter on its own DSL modem. We put all other computers, video and screen-sharing on our other cablemodem connection.
• Competing for bandwidth. If you have teens or power users, you have yet another reason: iTunes video downloads and bit torrents. They download whole seasons of a show at once – a 2 to 5 Gigabyte package – and trash your remote meeting in the process. (Remember when kids just wanted a car? Now they need their own cable modem! Sigh.)
  
• Tip: Let the VoIP adapter control your bandwidth. If you use a VoIP adapter, look for instructions to hook the VoIP adapter up  BEFORE your home router, like this:
  [Cable or DSL Modem] <–> [VoIP Adapter] <– >[Router] <–> [Computers]

If you are the outsider, use the tools the client uses

Since we are the “outsiders” in our clients’ worlds, we must use what they do. That means I can be contacted through (big breath):  AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Google, Skype, SMS, ICQ, Jabber, E-Mail, Facebook, Linked-In, Myspace, Cellular Phone, Telephone and Fax, and work with you using PPTP, IPSEC and Cisco VPN, Polycom, WebEx, GoToMeeting, Acrobat Connect, GatherPlace, Xerox Docushare, eRooms, Basecamp, several flavors of Microsoft’s collaboration tools (they really should stop re-branding the stuff!)  and some more I can’t recall just at the moment.

This is a drag. Someone, hurry up and unify this stuff so we all can use whatever client we wish and not have to know (or pay for!) all these nearly-almost-but-not-quite-the-same services designed to lock us in.

The reality is that established corporations have policies about what they will and will not allow on their networks. They also choose by the reliability of the products, and these days, that means the service provider has invested intensively in a global network of servers in the hope that all participants get uninterrupted connection.

• My top enterprise-grade screen-sharing and presentation choices: WebEx (now owned by Cisco Systems) or GoToMeeting (from Citrix.com – a really smart company).
• Some of my colleagues speak highly of Microsoft LiveMeeting, but I don’t see a way for small businesses and workgroups to affordably adopt it, in comparison to the competition.
• I can’t recommend Adobe Acrobat Connect. Some may love it, but for me, it has frustrated and disappointed too often.

If you are the host, use what is compatible with your client’s platform – and screen size!

Being a good host means making your participants change as little about their computing environment as possible. Macs are now experiencing double-digit market growth, and are making ground in corporations. Linux is much more uncommon as a desktop, but it is out there. I don’t know anyone currently screen-sharing on their phone’s browser, but the technology exists, and I BET it might be possible on Apple’s iPhone. Bottom line: If any of your customers use another platform, then choose a solution that works for them, too.

• Know your roles. Each application may have a slightly different label, but the roles are:
  • Host – you set up the meeting;
  • Presenter – you display your screen;
  • Participant – you view a Presenter’s screen.

• Not everyone needs to host or present. Many tools allow you to pass the role of presenter around, but NOT for all platforms. If your customers will ONLY watch YOUR screen, it is enough that the solution offer them a “Participant” – often a simple Java client in a web browser.

  That said, when Ann and I collaborate with clients, we often reverse roles and have them work on their own files while we observe their screen. For our practice, we insist the solutions we use offer cross-platform Presenter as an option. Webex and GatherPlace work well, offering Mac and Linux Host, Presenter and Participant. GoToMeeting limits Macs to a participant role at this time. [Update 2009-4-29: GoToMeeting now works with Macs, although we haven't had the best of luck with the new Mac client.] Here’s a great comparison chart at GatherPlace.net. (Disclosure: We are in the referral program for GatherPlace.)

• Tip: Be aware of your screen size when presenting. That new 2560 x x1600 monitor looks drop-dead gorgeous on your desk, but when you go to present that report with WebEx, you run into a problem: Your participants (those with smaller monitors) might only see the top-left corner of the document, or get seasick scrolling around to see the whole of the presentation. And remember that guy on the iPhone? 480×320? Fahgeddaboutit!!! Screen-sharing software has a ‘fit-to-window’ function, but it might be better for you to reduce your monitor’s resolution for a more consistent experience. (Photo Credit – Apple, Inc.)
  
• Tip: Watch your own presentation. At times, Ann and I will connect to our own meeting with a second  computer just so we can have immediate feedback about our participant’s experience, and catch a stalled session before the participants even have a chance to notice.

Mix and Match for your needs and your budget

• Don’t buy more seats than you need. You can often add additional seats online, instantly, on the rare occasion you need them. For instance, we rarely have more than 5 computers in a meeting, even when we have 15 or 20 attendees – most people share a single connection in a board room.
• If you will need to conduct more than one meeting at the same time, buy concurrent meeting rooms. Ann and I cover this by having one meeting room with WebEx, and one with GatherPlace, but we could easily and affordably add a room to either service.
• In order of affordability (one year of operation):
  • Gatherplace.net (Choose Premium for Screen Sharing and decent Telephone Bridge)
  • GoToMeeting.com (Great screen sharing; weaker cross-platform support.)
  • WebEx. Screen-sharing is great. I wouldn’t use their telephone bridge or any other features – you will end up with a surprisingly large bill.

Audio: How you sound is even MORE important in a remote meeting

Radio personalities and podcasters count upon the right microphone and studio environment to create a more intimate, right-there experience for the listener. Indie film producers also know that great audio can make weak video ‘look’ better. With a little care, you can increase both clarity and impact of what you say in remote meetings.

• Record yourself. Few go to the trouble of recording how they sound on their cellphone, bluetooth headset or computer microphone. At the very least, call and leave a voicemail on your own office system (not a cellphone).
• Get a decent phone. Some 2.4 GHz cordless phones interfere with your WIFI connection (try 5.8 GHz models). Some phones interact poorly with VoIP and cheap conference bridges and trash your voice. Some phones just sound bad. We use Uniden cordless phones at present, and like them.
• Get a headset with a noise-canceling microphone. Plantronics, HelloDirect, Sennheiser and Logitech all make decent noise-canceling headsets for any common device or phone. I frequently get positive comments about voice quality when I’m using my Andrea headset, which was designed for voice recognition software.
• Bluetooth headsets and speakerphones usually suck. If you are NOT in the main conference room, avoid speakerphones if at all possible. If you must, ClearOne makes decent portable speakerphones for your computer. Likewise, Bluetooth headsets are a work in progress. Ann has gone through many supposedly top-of-the-line Bluetooth devices. I own one of the best noise canceling headsets currently on the market – the Aliph Jawbone. I can talk in normal tones 6 feet from a running lawnmower, yet Ann can’t stand the tinny, digitized sound when I’m in a quiet room. There you go.
• Just say no to background noise. Background noise is a double-whammy – you sound bad in the meeting, and you end up SHOUTING WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE TO. Stuck in a noisy location? Use the MUTE button on your phone to give relief to the other participants until you need to speak (from the background noise, that is!). If it is comfortable enough, consider sitting in your parked car – a virtual sound booth on wheels!
• Get your nose out of the mic! Okay, everyone knows what I’m talking about – the rumbling downdraft we hear when you exhale through your nose or mouth onto your microphone. Position your mic at the corner of your mouth, out of the ‘wind’!

Video: I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille…

I like video in my remote meetings. I think it adds an important element of presence, and a dimension of communication that minimizes misunderstanding. However, it can make things MUCH more complex.

• Start small. If you plan to experiment with video, Skype video is very good, easy, and free. Logitech provides decent external webcams. Pay a little more for their high-end models to get better optics. All recent Apple computers have excellent little webcams built in. WebEx offers good presenter video, and now offers a panel of up to 6 locations at the same time in even their basic product. Most of the instant messaging services offer video, but they can be a pain to configure. Polycom provides GREAT multipoint videoconferencing, but suffers from even more demanding network and firewall setup requirements.
• Set the stage. Most workspaces are designed to light your work, and not you, so out of the box, most people look ghastly, if the face can be seen at all. (Think: videos of informants on a current events expose…) A professional who chooses to use video often should really re-think their office, furniture, lighting, wardrobe and background so they can send a presentable image. A doorway or a window in the camera’s line of sight can alternatively distract and blow out the image. New video software offers the option to put in virtual backdrops, but again, this requires even more control of lighting and camera vibration. Or, you can get a pop-up backdrop, as seen here. For an EXCELLENT, accessible introduction to making your cheapo-webcam look great, visit this article at Strobist. (Photo Credit: David – strobist.blogspot.com)
• Stay tuned for TelePresence. You like Skype Video? Have between US $50,000 and $500,000 to invest per location? (I wish I were kidding…) Check out the latest telepresence suites from Cisco, HP and Polycom.

Bringing it all home

So yes, it is possible to achieve great remote collaboration on a budget, but it requires a whole new suite of products, services, choices, skills and sensitivities. Start with the premise of a bombproof voice connection and reliable telephone bridge. Add redundant Internet service, then select a remote collaboration tool compatible with your colleague’s environment, and with a reputation for reliability. Tune up your audio quality, and add properly-lit video when all else is solid.

Hard work? Sure it is. But when it all comes together, we’ll be more productive, form better remote relationships, and hopefully do it with fewer carbon-spewing airline flights! See you online…