Virtual Office Tools

Grasshopper New Media is a virtual office. My podcasting studio is in northern Massachusetts. My executive producers are from Massachusetts, Oklahoma, and the U.K. My web helper is in the U.K. My illustrator is in Seattle. My virtual assistant is in California. Contributors are from ALL OVER.

So, what’s one to do?

I posed a similar question (but different) to Bryan Person of the New Comm Road podcast. (Bryan just got a new job at a certain employment website company. Roar!) Here’s the question (and my answer) for you:

What Virtual Office Tools Are Essential to You?

If you were going to run a company that’s not in the same building, and where the employees are scattered all over the globe and time zones, how would you tie it all together? I want to know your answers and thoughts.

Here’s my toolkit so far:

Chris’s Virtual Office Toolkit

• Email- Gmail – It’s just easy to use. I am used to the interface. I tied all my various domain addresses back to this one client.

• Chat- AIM – of the clients, it has the most 3rd party software available, and it’s just easy.
• Chat- Campfire- a 37 Signals product that does group chat in a nice format (oh, I owe Erica a file)
• Phone- Skype- How do you beat free and mostly free? The software runs well, and I’ve used this tool a little more every month.
• Writing- Writely- Okay, you can’t get an account if you don’t have one already. Writeboard by 37 Signals is good, too.
• Project- Basecamp- I haven’t really used this yet with this project. I don’t have firm timelines in place, might be why.
• Wiki – PBWiki – I use wikis to store information. I like PBWiki best of all, because it’s just plain easy and usable. I’ve tried others. I like pbwiki.
• Blog- WordPress- I used to be a Blogger man, but after having configured about 10 (and then getting dave to fix them), I like WordPress.

What else should be on that list? What else do you use for software tools? Have you organized people or projects in a virtual form before?