In the Clouds

Many of us at Tandem work remotely. This benefit poses some unique obstacles when it comes to the technology we use. We have had to find tools to help us to work smarter, while not disrupting our work flow.

Everyone has seen those Microsoft commercials airing recently where people "Go to the cloud." Well, we've gone to the cloud for most of our technology solutions. SaaS (Software as a Service) options make the most sense for us. For example, we don't have an IT department to help us maintain something like a physical server.


Before I came on board the company tried to maintain a Sharepoint system. It ended up being too complicated and just too much for what we needed. We then tried Basecamp. Though Basecamp is the cool kid of file sharing and works for some teams, we weren't taking advantage of its collaboration features and instead were trying to use it like a file server, which it is not.

We're now using a cloud file system called Egnyte (Velma to Basecamp's Daphne). It has a few features that really work for us. You can mount it like a drive on your computer, which helps with adaption for people who don't want to use the web version. It has file versioning, file locking (making a document read-only), FTP-like file sharing features, the ability to upload large files through an FTP, and has a feature that easily allows you to back up your computer. It has also allowed us to get rid of a separate cloud server where we housed really large media files that we weren't able to store on previous file servers.

Egnyte, however, is not a collaboration tool. We didn't use the whiteboards available on Basecamp, and though we are on Yammer, we don't really use that as a collaboration tool either. It turns out that we like to meet face-to-face to collaborate. Since some of us are on the West Coast, we've been able to accomplish that through our use of Skype.

Skype recently released a Group Video Calling beta that we've been using on our conference calls. Since we're rarely physically together, seeing each other through Skype has helped bridge the gaps. We finally have visual cues as to when it is ok to speak without stepping on someone else's comment, and we're held accountable for any eye rolling or fantasy football stats we're checking while on a conference call. (I can see you typing!)

We also use SaaS solutions for our Outlook/Entourage email through Mailstreet, and we are trying out a time tracking solution online through Toggl, which offers both desktop and smartphone widgets.

It turns out that keeping our head in the clouds was a pretty smart decision.