There are many tools available to the virtual team, more every day ñ so many that the sheer variety of viable alternatives can be a significant obstacle. See, for example, CoWorking Tools.

I've identified seven types of Internet-based services, and featured one example of each. This is inherently unfair. There are so many valuable services available in each category, and, with new categories are evolving all the time, it is "virtually" impossible to make specific recommendations. Ultimately, it depends on the team, the task, the technology at hand, and what turns out to be the most fun.

The most empowering tool for virtual teamwork is the one that is most successful in helping the team get its work done. The most valuable tool for virtual teams tends to be one that helps them accelerate the creation and development of their documents.

If team members were all in the same room, working on a document, theyíd probably find themselves sitting around a computer. One of them would be acting in a role I call "Technographer," adding contributions to the document in real time, organizing, formatting on-the-fly.

Online, the virtual team needs a tool that would give the Technographer the ability to broadcast the teamís document on computer screens from Omaha to Osaka, and edit the file in real time. This technology is available through any of several providers of "web conferencing" services. (For more about these services, see the Conferencing Tools page and CoWorking Conferencing Services). Each service offers a suite of tools to support a variety of communication needs for large and small scale distributed meetings. PlaceWare, for example, offers a tool for showing presentations, a tool for voting, a tool for making slides on the fly, a tool for cobrowsing, and a tool called "Live Demo." Itís the Live Demo tool that allows the Technographer to broadcast, live, in real time, any file in any application that is on his computer. 3M offers a free, 30-day trial of PlaceWare, and thereís no better way to understand Technography than by playing with it. To sign up for the free trial, go to the Instant Web Conferencing section. 

Electronic documents are a medium unto themselves. They can be shared, edited, annotated, and commented upon endlessly. Thus they tend to be developed iteratively, not entirely at any meeting, but over a period of time.

As the virtual team develops its documents, it creates multiple versions. If the documents are emailed out to the members, and different members continue working on different versions, the multiplicity proliferates. Tools that support document management become as vital as tools that facilitate document creation.

NetDocuments is one such online service. It provides online storage and retrieval, so that everyone is always working from the same version.

While Web Conferencing is the ideal environment for real-time collaboration, the virtual team needs communication tools that span time as much as space.

"Instant Messenger" tools (like AIM from America On-line and ICQ), are abbreviated email servers that allow team members to send and receive short text messages to each other. Because the team can exchange Instant Messages no matter what other applications they are using at the time, these tools give virtual teamworkers an "anytime channel" to each other, effectively complementing the high-bandwidth, real-time environment of teleconferencing and webconferencing.

Instant Messaging is best used when a team member is seeking a more or less instant response. A comprehensive toolkit for virtual teamworkers needs to include services that accommodate the widest possible time span.

The ability to send email to one or every member of the team greatly enhances the teamís abilities to communicate over time. The problem is that messages tend to get lost, deleted, misfiled. A more effective solution is a service that combines email with a central, web-based repository that would allow messages to be tracked, retrieved, and reviewed. There are many services that offer this web/email combination. One such is eGroups.

As the virtual team extends its collaboration over a period of days or weeks it finds greater and greater value in tools that allow it to collaborate over time. These tools, the stuff upon which virtual communities are built, are known as message boards, bulletin boards, or conference servers. Unlike email, they exist wholly on the web, serving the virtual team not only as a communication tool, but also as a knowledge repository.

This technology can get quite complex, ranging from products like Lotus Notes to elegant, topic-focused systems like QuickTopic. Iíve started our own sample online "quick topic." Click on Virtual Teamwork to participate.

The products of a virtual team can not always stay virtual. Sooner or later deliverables need to get delivered, in hard copy.

Here services like Mimeo become a welcome extension of the virtual teamís capabilities. These instant printing services will take the teamís electronic documents, print, bind and deliver them the next day.

In the best of all possible virtual worlds, a service that could effectively integrate all the technologies and capabilities of web conferencing, instant messaging, email, bulletin board, document sharing and instant printing could offer virtual teamworkers a package far greater than the sum of its components.

Given the nature of competition on the web, single-purpose solutions tend to get better faster. In their attempt to distinguish themselves from the increasing variety of similar solutions, they are continually refining and extending their offerings. The document-sharing service that today features ease-of-use and security tomorrow will include the ability to synchronize with your Palm and the day after tomorrow with your telephone. The best integrated service will probably always be the one that you integrate yourself.

Nonetheless, integrated services offer a welcome environment, especially for a manager who doesnít have the time or information to cobble together a unique environment for virtual collaboration. See CoWorking Offices for a listing of virtual offices and online project management centers.

For more on Virtual Teamwork, see my "Meeting on the Edge" series of fieldguides on Mightywords.

About the Author
Bernard DeKoven has spent more than thirty years as a leader in the development of methods for teaching collaborative skills. He is the author of Connected Executives, a book that has been received with praise from noted industry experts. He also developed and produced the Meeting Meter(tm), a software "taxi meter for meetings" that was written up in Business Week, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, Working Woman, US News and World Reports, NPR's Marketplace, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Examiner.

Article copyright 2000 Bernard DeKoven.

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