JonathanMelhuish.com

As I’m living in Poland and the rest of my team are currently in various parts of the U.K., we naturally rely quite heavily on telecommunications technologies. Of course, we use email for most non-urgent communication and SMS for more pressing issues, such as organising conference calls. But here’s a trio of technologies that perhaps you’re not making full use of already:

• Skype - I know plenty of people already use Skype to call their long-lost relatives on the other side of the world, but it’s actually pretty good for business, too. Although there are occasional issues with call quality, it’s very useful to be able to send files and web addresses to each other during the conversation. And setting up a conference call is as easy as clicking a few buttons - much easier than trying to figure out how to do that on a normal telephone.
• Google Docs - you might not see the point in struggling with the sometimes slightly awkward interface when you’ve got a perfectly good office suite on your desktop. The real reason to persevere is that Google Docs makes it really easy to work on documents together - even at exactly the same time. For instance, we can keep notes or jot ideas whilst in a Skype conference, and everyone sees what we’ve written. So no arguments about who said they’d do what!
• Gliffy - sadly Gliffy’s updating isn’t so fast, so things can get a bit confusing when more than one person is working on a document at the same time. But it’s still a great way to generate diagrams together.

Of course, none of these technologies cope with the fact that it’s very easy for people to go incommunicado - after all, you won’t bump into them in the corridor. I think remote-controlled electric-shock collars are the best solution…