Like many little web businesses, our staff doesn’t all work in the same office. Jess and I work from our office or our home in Boston, Mary-Heather works from Albuquerque, and Sarah works from Houston. There are lots of amazing tools that help us work together as a team and feel more connected and less isolated. Here are some of the things that we can’t live without:

Campfire and Propane - team chat

What would we do without team chat? Campfire is the web-based group chat that keeps our team connected throughout the day. With chat, we don’t feel like we are working alone, thousands of miles apart.

There are many web-based chat services but we like Campfire. It works well for our needs and there are some great ways to extend it. Propane is an excellent tabbed native chat client for Macs that we use when we are at our own computers. Ember is a Campfire client for iPhone… and we integrate Campfire with the rest of Ravelry through a Ruby API (Tinder) and built-in connections from our help desk / email support software.

Communicating without distracting

Unlike IM, having a team chat gives us a way to have the a communications channel that doesn’t always demand immediate attention. We can leave notes for others to see when they have a chance, jump into a full on chat or meeting when we need to, and page one another visually by taking advantage of the Growl notifications that Propane offers.

Email bad

The last thing that we need is more email. Chat has given us a way to share information and discuss things without adding to our already-overwhelming email load.

Integrating notifications

Ravelbot, our automated chat robot, pops in to let us know about things that have occurred in Ravelry or in our customer service email that we may want to know about. We don’t want to have to check screens of important information or run reports but we also don’t want to deal with email notifications.

By using the different APIs that Campfire offers, we can connect our own software to chat so that we know about important events as they happen.

Skitch - easy screen capture sharing

We love Skitch so much. A screen capture application doesn’t seem like a big deal but there are a few features that make it indispensable to us:

Upload your capture in one click. We share screenshots of things in chat so much that it really is important that it is easy. Talking about things is so much faster when you immediately share a image from the site, someone else’s site, email, twitter, whatever.

Upload to your own host. Since Skitch can upload any image (not just a screen capture) in one click, we save a lot of time by using it to store images that we post on the site, in forum posts, in blog entries, and in other places. When we do these things, we definitely want to store the images on our own server for more permanence and less bandwidth concerns. Skitch can upload to any host via SFTP, FTP, or WebDAV.

Easy annotating and drawing. Once you’ve got an image, it’s really easy to add arrows, text, draw, do whatever you want to do before you share with someone else.

Our Campfire chats are peppered with screenshots and annotated images and it really makes communicating a lot easier and a little more fun.

Dropbox - file sharing that feels local

Shared folders - sometimes you need them. Dropbox is the best file-sharing application that I’ve ever used. The client works on Windows, Mac, Linux and provides you with a real shared folder on your machine that looks and acts like a normal local folder. The web site works well when you aren’t at your own computer. There are RSS feeds and Growl notifications for updates. There is a revision history in case you need to recover previous versions of a file…

Most importantly, the syncing in the background is transparent and seamless. A copy of your files are stored on each machine that is configured to use Dropbox and the application takes care of the syncing for you in the background. If you aren’t connected to the Internet, you still have your files, and if you make changes they are synchronized when you next connect.

Email - Helpspot

Gmail is one good way of easily sharing general email boxes and linking to individual messages if you want to talk about them. We started out using shared IMAP accounts (regular email accounts) because all of us have mail clients that we prefer to Gmail - Pine for me, Apple Mail for Jess and MH. As we’ve grown, it has become harder to manage the volume of email and harder to keep track what is happening with all of the individual users and other people that we communicate with.

We now use Helpspot for most of our general mailboxes. Helpspot is a web-based email app that is aimed at customer support. Helpspot helps us work together in a few ways:

• We can share links to messages when we need to talk about them
• Much like Gmail conversations, we can see history so that we can easily pick up on an existing conversation
• I’ve integrated the Helpspot email with Ravelry itself so we can all see email histories in relevant places - this helps because a previous conversation that someone else had with a person may be important and this way we can know what is going on without asking (or discovering later)
• Helpspot has a Campfire API that we use to automatically push certain messages to chat so that we can all see and talk about certain types of issues/questions

…and I ran out of steam. I’ll just post this now before I relegate it to the draft pile. I suppose I don’t really need to talk about Google Docs or Skype anyway Hopefully someone will find these things useful or interesting.

Is there anything that your office can’t live without?

edit One little thing - we’ve been using oovoo for 3-way video chats. iChat seemed too bandwidth intensive and Skype only does 2-way video. oovoo has an ugly client but the service works pretty well.