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Ask Slashdot: Whiteboard Substitutes For Distributed Teams? 164

Posted by timothy from the just-wire-your-brains-together dept.
DoofusOfDeath writes I work on a fully distributed software development team with 5-10 people. Normally it's great, but when we're doing heavy design work, we really need to all be standing in front of a whiteboard together. This is expensive and time consuming, because it involves airplanes and hotels. Conference calls, editing shared Google docs, etc. just don't seem to be the same. Have people found any good tools or practices to replace standing in front of a real whiteboard?
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Ask Slashdot: Whiteboard Substitutes For Distributed Teams? More

Ask Slashdot: Whiteboard Substitutes For Distributed Teams?

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  • White board is and will always be the best way (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    sorry, but we are physical beings.

    • And thats what he's asking for, but distributed.

      This is not a new question, comes up in my office rather often as we have a lot of teams working from different parts of the world. I'm curious as to see what others have to say myself as we've considered a side project to create a distributed whiteboard that doesn't suck ourselves.

      One that shares the display between more than one location, as well as does neat things like letting you export documents from the drawings such as flowcharts and things like that.

  • Does this ever actually work? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Really, asking Slashdot? All you're going to get is a bunch of snarky comments and a holy war or two.

    • Really, asking Slashdot? All you're going to get is a bunch of snarky comments and a holy war or two.

      I, for one, welcome our blue and black SystemD overlords.

  • SpecLog (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jordanjay29 ( 1298951 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @02:38PM (#49154655)
    I recently did some research into (but not actual production use of) SpecLog [speclog.net]. It's part of a TDD suite built as a Cucumber implementation for .NET. However, SpecLog is the one product that steps out of the IDE and allows devs, managers and clients to all be on the same footing. It's basically a digital whiteboard made specifically for specifications and requirements gathering. It uses a repository backend which allows for remote input and synchronization, and a graphical interface that lays out and connects features, user stories, actors and business goals all together.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'm sorry, but your post is as useless as a marketing blurb. You've said nothing about how one actually interacts with that software.Is it like a whiteboard, with just a single area where erveryone interacts? at the same time? Or are multiple there pages? Is there a moderator when one collaborates, or can anyone just draw/write, paste into the same "document"? What platforms does it run on? Does it support video conferencing at the same time, or at least audio, or does one need a separate solution for that?

      • Thanks. I didn't really get much of a chance to use it in a live environment, so I don't know the kinds of features that were desired. I looked into it for another reason, and eventually found that SpecLog's sister project, SpecFlow, was a better fit for the needs.

        I'll answer your questions as best I can.

        SpecLog is a Windows/.NET 4.0 application. As far as I'm aware it only runs via Windows, but it has several export options for HTML, PDF, or spreadsheets. It also connects to a Microsoft SQL Server on

  • OpenMeetings (Score:4, Interesting)

    by kallen3 ( 171792 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @02:39PM (#49154665)

    Ever tried OpenMeetings (http://openmeetings.apache.org)? It has a whiteboard in it and I have been in group discussions using it, voice and video. Not as good as a face to face but better than having to travel especially when weather makes it difficult. I think Google Hangouts does something like that too but have not tried it.

    • Similar is Big Blue Button (a google summer of code project) - whiteboard functionality, upload files and do the "john madden football commentator thing" to them, voice and cam sharing, ability to mute, etc. And can be set up to record meetings/conferences/etc. Tested it a while back stand-along on a linode that would be $10/mo now (it was a $20/mo plan then), and it was enough to support 15 users at once as long as they all weren't connected via the same wireless link to the LAN to get out to the World

  • Rocketboard (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28, 2015 @02:40PM (#49154671)

    http://www.rocketboard.it/

    • Oooh, nice.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Another vote for Rocketboard here. It's not 2-way sharing, but I'm not sure if you need that or not. What it does for whiteboard broadcasting and saving, though, is excellent!

    • On OS X, I highly recommend BaiBoard [baiboard.com]

      It's simple, easy to use, and free.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mdm42 ( 244204 )
        In my own (quite extensive) experience working in distributed teams, you're almost never going to find the entire team using OS X; it's a near certainty that all OSs will be represented, so a single-platform solution is a non-starter, no matter how good it may be.

        • In my own (quite extensive) experience working in distributed teams, you're almost never going to find the entire team using OS X; it's a near certainty that all OSs will be represented, so a single-platform solution is a non-starter, no matter how good it may be.

          It really depends on what your budget is and how distributed your team is. If there are only 2-3 different locations
          then getting a couple dedicated OS X boxes just for a distributed whiteboard would be worth it.
          I also work on a distributed team and I have considered spending a weekend playing with the wii remote hack to
          see if I could get it working as a whiteboard. 40" lcds are cheap enough that if it actually worked, I could easily
          justifying buying one for everyone on the team (but I probably wouldn't ha

        • In my own (quite extensive) experience working in distributed teams, you're almost never going to find the entire team using OS X; it's a near certainty that all OSs will be represented, so a single-platform solution is a non-starter, no matter how good it may be.

          I don't know that I'd agree with "almost never". In my own experience, also extensive, and also distributed, most of the people I have had need to use a whiteboard with were already using OS X. It has a disproportionate presence among developers, although Apple lately seems less willing to support its developer base.

          At the same time, I won't pretend that my own experience represents the typical situation. I'm not going to claim it's everybody's thing. Which is why I wrote "IF you're on OS X..."

  • How about using a whiteboard? (Score:5, Informative)

    by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @02:42PM (#49154685)

    No, seriously.

    I know I've seen systems that use sensors you mount around the edge of a whiteboard and special markers to track where you are drawing and reproduce it electronically on remote monitors -- it's on a cheap system, but it's cheaper than flying people in airplanes all over the place.

    You could also just have the whiteboard person use a graphics tablet, and skip the big arm movements.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      whoops. meant to say the electronic whiteboard scanner is *not a cheap system.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by vanye ( 7120 )

      We use two E-Beam Edges, one in the US (with projector) and one in the UK (large TV).

      I'm pretty happy with them - I'd recommend them.

      Coupled with video-conferencing using TelyHD gives use an effective remote office presence in the UK.

      It means I can still participate in interactive design meetings while I'm in the UK.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by unrtst ( 777550 )

      Seriously? Digital whiteboard? How does the other side touch it?

      In this day and age of tablet ubiquity, it's the ONE THING they should be nailing perfectly. There should be a couple "standard" protocols or apps for this (though I won't hold my breath... the main text chat clients/protocols don't interoperate, so who would expect anything more complicated to work).

      Every time I go to look for a whiteboard solution (networked and multi-user), I'm amazed that the old solutions are no longer around, and there's

      • Seriously? Digital whiteboard? How does the other side touch it?

        That was a trick question right? If the other side also has a digital whiteboard then they can scribble on the same image.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by unrtst ( 777550 )

          I picked a really poor phrase there. See the comment one above mine: "I know I've seen systems that use sensors you mount around the edge of a whiteboard and special markers to track where you are drawing and reproduce it electronically on remote monitors"

          In those cases, they are one way systems. You can setup another going the other direction, but it's not a shared whiteboard. The remote end can't tell your markers to draw on your board.

          There are ones that use a projector and fake makers (ie. a marker shap

          • Compatibility issues is not something I've seen. The whiteboards we use (Hitachi Starboards at our end, some Sharp at one of the other locations, and I'm not sure about the rest of the company) are input devices, windows treats them as a tablet device nothing more. They are glorified projectors with pen input.

            Any collaboration software which will allow shared drawing on a single canvas works on these boards. Sure you get extra features if you use a specific manufacturer's own software like quick changing co

  • Very simple solution (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Buy tablets and have someone host a shared VNC session of mspaint.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xeoron ( 639412 )
      That or use Adobe's Creative Cloud, which lets you share and edit documents in RT. Create a canvas in one of their drawing programs and treat is as a whiteboard online,then invite X number of people to mark it up and view.

  • Ladybug (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    In eons past, I used Coccinella [thecoccinella.org] against my own jabber server. Free software, but a bit stale now.

  • Whiteboards and whiteboarding are a bad idea. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28, 2015 @02:48PM (#49154719)

    Whiteboarding is a symptom of a greater problem: the inability to properly break down concepts into simpler concepts.

    Some may say that whiteboards are a tool to enable this, but that's never the case. Whiteboarding does the opposite. It allows the most vocal participants to add complexity to a situation.

    If you can't express the idea in text and text alone, then you haven't broken it down properly. Drawing pictures on a whiteboard won't help with this.

    In fact, it makes the situation even worse. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. More words are exactly what we're trying to avoid. We need fewer pictures, and hence fewer words to describe the concepts at hand.

    Anyone who has worked with UML and any real programming language will know that this is true. One UML diagram can result in hundreds of thousands of lines of unnecessary Java code. Often that same Java code could, if written sensibly, take up less than a few hundred lines.

    • Re:Whiteboards and whiteboarding are a bad idea. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BitZtream ( 692029 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @03:00PM (#49154805)

      If you can't express the idea in text and text alone, then you haven't broken it down properly

      A picture is worth a thousand words, FOR A REASON.

      And you're an idiot.

      I don't need to write a manuscript to describe an abstract problem when a couple boxes and some lines will do the same thing. That doesn't mean I've given exact specifications for a problem either.

      Anyone who has worked with UML and any real programming language will know that this is true. One UML diagram can result in hundreds of thousands of lines of unnecessary Java code.

      Anyone who has worked with UML and thinks you convert that to code doesn't understand code, they've just bought into the UML hype (thats still happening? WTF I thought it died 15 years ago). You seem to think the drawing is the code, and again, you're an idiot. The drawing is a way to describe whats happening in an abstract way so others have a general idea of the concept. It IS NOT the code, its abstract logic.

      UML and Java ... you pretty much showed in that little blurb you're not qualified to be part of this discussion. Go back to being a middle manager who doesn't know anything about software design or actually writing code.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        In the Real World, Java is the most widely used programming language, and will be for some time. C#, which is a lot like Java, is close behind.

        We hear a lot about Ruby and Go and Rust these days, but they see very limited use. The only reason we hear a lot about them is because there are a lot of unemployed people who have lots of time to sit around yelling about how great these technologies are.

        UML is still used, too, especially for larger projects. If you're the kind of person who only ever works on simpl

      • And you're an idiot.

        I'll need you to state that with a picture.

      • Pictures and text. Both are required.

        I've seen "specs" that consisted solely of a bunch of pictures and high-level diagrams, where I would have had to be a mind-reader to figure out what was going on at the detail level. In these cases, text would have gone a long way toward explaining some of the more subtle details of an interaction/procedure/design.

        I've also seen "specs" that were a giant wall of text, where I had to get out a whiteboard and draw on my own because a human being couldn't possibly keep the

    • Re:Whiteboards and whiteboarding are a bad idea. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Half-pint HAL ( 718102 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @04:01PM (#49155109)

      If you can't express the idea in text and text alone, then you haven't broken it down properly.

      ...and at the planning stage, you are still trying to break down the problem. The core concept behind team thinking is that individually, we often fail to analyse the situation completely, and input from others can show holes in our reasoning and things we've failed to properly consider. The whole, hopefully, is greater than the sum of its parts.

      I'm coding alone at the moment, and because I have no-one to bounce ideas off, I frequently find myself heading into dead-ends because the problem domain I'm dealing with is very large, and as there's no-one to discuss things with, I need to prototype to find my mistakes. Then I have to go back and rewrite.

      • I'm coding alone at the moment, and because I have no-one to bounce ideas off, I frequently find myself heading into dead-ends because the problem domain I'm dealing with is very large, and as there's no-one to discuss things with, I need to prototype to find my mistakes. Then I have to go back and rewrite.

        Start with a partner or friends. If it's about UI issues or related things, they don't need to be programmers or versed deep into the problem at hand. People that know nothing about it actually can at times give you the best ideas, exactly because they know nothing about it and haven't yet restricted their minds by thinking about it. The programmatic implementation itself of course you have to do yourself, but that's generally the straightforward part (after you properly defined the problem, and the solutio

        • The programmatic implementation itself of course you have to do yourself, but that's generally the straightforward part

          I'm working in natural language processing for generating parallel equivalent text in multiple languages.

          (after you properly defined the problem, and the solution you want to work towards).

          That's a bit circular though, because my difficulty is properly defining the problem, or rather the set of all subproblems, and the solution(s). It's easy to implement once you know what you're doing, but if we all knew what we were doing, there'd be much less buggy software out there....

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Bengie ( 1121981 )

      If you can't express the idea in text and text alone, then you haven't broken it down properly. Drawing pictures on a whiteboard won't help with this.

      And you should be able to compose great music via sheet music alone, but it might be a good idea to actually listen to your music.

    • If you can't express the idea in text and text alone, then you haven't broken it down properly. Drawing pictures on a whiteboard won't help with this.

      Feynman diagrams?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      yeah it's always bad when vocal participants like the client(product owner whatever) wants to add complexity to actually make the product do what it is supposed to do..

      and if you actually make an uml diagram that results in hundreds of thousands of lines of java code that does the same thing as 100 lines then you have fucked up quite badly in both making the uml diagram and writing the code.

      I think the OP was asking for a solution to do just high level design anyhow, to slash up the work into smaller logica

  • online whiteboard? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Try Mural.ly

  • lifesize video conference (Score:4, Interesting)

    by iceco2 ( 703132 ) <meirmaor@gmai l . com> on Saturday February 28, 2015 @02:49PM (#49154729)

    I have used pretty much every tool out there skype, goto meeting hangouts to name the more popular ones. But when I did some work with E-bay a while back I got a chance to work with their lifesize system. The camera the screen the high definition and the lack of lag come together to make something far better then anything else I used. I suspect they charge an arm and a leg for such a setup but it works. (I have no financial intrest in lifesize )

  • A couple solutions (Score:4, Insightful)

    by GoodNewsJimDotCom ( 2244874 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @02:50PM (#49154737)
    1) You can use Join.me or Gotomeeting and everyone can share the same picture. Fire up a paint program, and voila whiteboard. I find coding with multiple people actually is cool when everyone can see the screen instead of being uncomfortably bunched together.

    2) For a bulletin board todo list, use www.Trello.com

    I love telecommuting work, it feels more efficient than in person office work.

    • Drawing on a computer is far slower than grabbing a marker and doing it on the whiteboard. You ever try writing text with a mouse?

      Whiteboards are NOT FOR CODE, I think thats another problem you're having. You draw flowcharts and make notes on the whiteboard, not write down code that then gets transcribed and compiled.

      • I agree, a mouse is horrible to draw with. A few people have mentioned Wacom tables. There are even models available with a built-in screen, for example, which makes it pretty easy for anyone to draw right on it with little training. It's normally used mostly by digital artists, but I could see it being useful for digital whiteboard sessions as well. It's also superior to tablets in that it's optimized for pen use rather than finger touches, which makes it much more precise for actually drawing.

      • Who said anything about a mouse? People write with a whiteboard marker, or in its digital form, a stylus.

        A number of years ago I worked for an organisation where people took notes in meetings using a Panasonic Toughbook. The software for the forthcoming Windows 10 is, hopefully, a lot more sophisticated than XP tablet edition as MS tune their software for touch/scribble.

  • Combination of Lync and Wacom Tablet... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Uzull ( 16705 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @02:56PM (#49154771) Homepage

    We use the combination of Microsoft Lync, where you can start a common whiteboard, and a Wacom Tablet, so you can do some freehand drawing.
    It is not free. But the cost is offset after one meeting with members from all over the world...

  • Multiple whiteboards + Google Hangout (Score:5, Interesting)

    by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Saturday February 28, 2015 @02:56PM (#49154779) Journal

    Okay, so the submitter asked for "good" solutions, and this may not qualify, but it's what I do: A whiteboard at each location, with a camera pointed at it. I can't draw on your drawing, but I can see what you draw, and you can see what I draw. I've experimented with various web-based shared whiteboards, but they all require drawing on the computer. Even with a tablet (either Wacom-style attached to a laptop/PC or a mobile device) and a pen, a real whiteboard is better.

    In my case, generally there are at most three locations in the meeting, and usually only two: My home office and a group of people in a conference room. Having more may make the "real whiteboards" solution less effective.

  • Electronic White Boards (Score:3)

    by ERJ ( 600451 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @02:57PM (#49154781)
    There are several companies that make electronic white boards. I have seen them in use a couple times and they are used in distance education. An example:

    http://smarttech.com/Home+Page/Solutions/Business+Solutions?WT.ac=homepage_bus [smarttech.com]

    • This. I use electronic whiteboards at work. The ability to share a session in the software is great. It works just like a real whiteboard except with more features and the ability for people in distributed locations to write on the same board in the same meeting is well worth it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bazorg ( 911295 )

      I've seen this one in action and it works really well. It's not a touchscreen like those on your phone, the screen edges work like a camera to find where your fingers and where the pens are. It works like a normal screen attached to your PC and then there's a Windows application that lets you make annotations beyond what the normal OCR and OneNote drawings allow. I'm trying to get my company to buy at least one of these.

      They also have smart whiteboards that scan their content and broadcast it to mobile phon

  • I'd bet surface hub would work well for this when (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    probably will be expensive but does exactly what you are asking for

  • Try to meet in person (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jgotts ( 2785 ) <(jgotts) (at) (gmail.com)> on Saturday February 28, 2015 @03:10PM (#49154869)

    There is no substitute for meeting in person. We've evolved over millions of years to meet with each other in person. Every distributed meeting I've ever attended has had yelling, mumbling, and misheard things caused by technological failures.

    If you're sketching out your next year's worth of work, spend the money and get together for it.

    If you're just talking about a couple of minor issues, then by all means use a distributed whiteboard.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yeah, a telephone is no substitute for talking in person. Tell Bell his invention sucks.

      Video conference stuff all sucks, as you can't smell the other people. (or offer to meet them in a motel afterwards)

      People have evolved to meet in person only.

    • Exactly. What people also forget is that it's not just about the whiteboard, it's at least as much about the beers afterwards. Getting to know your colleagues in person helps a lot in getting cooperation going (it helps you interpret the writing in their e-mails properly, for example).

      There is no real substitute for in-person meetings. And considering the problem at hand has already the budget of flying people around to get it solved, you'd better make use of it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by qpqp ( 1969898 )
      The obligatory Tripp Crosby [youtube.com]

  • Mural.ly (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28, 2015 @03:20PM (#49154927)

    I worked on a product that tried to solve this problem... It's but super expensive and not very well executed: Bluescape.com. There are youtube videos showing it in action.

    The best thing out there I've seen is mural.ly

    • Yeah, Mural.ly is great, but more of a sketchboarding solution (like BoardThing) than a shared whiteboard.

      Would gladly use mural.ly if the team would adopt it.

  • Messaging problem hiding as a whiteboard problem (Score:5, Interesting)

    by quietwalker ( 969769 ) <pdughi@gmail.com> on Saturday February 28, 2015 @03:23PM (#49154933)

    The problem you're having isn't a whiteboard issue. It's not technology. It's that you're only getting half the message.

    You may not be aware of it, but person-to-person communication is extremely high bandwidth. It's so high that we rarely even recognize the component parts of it, and only come up with little more than a mux generalization, like "they're angry" or "they're unsure". Our minds look at someone's stance and posture, at the speed they're blinking, where their eyes are looking, whether or not there's a nearly imperceptible pause when they're about to say certain words, subconscious muscle tics, and so on, and it passes through this great big neural net and some sort of amazing transformation happens and we get discrete knowledge out the other end. What's more, what they're doing is always going to partially be a response to what we're doing; we're providing real time feedback and both of us are adjusting ourselves accordingly. We're so good at it, that about 5 words into an introduction, we can usually tell if someone likes us or not.

    On the other hand, a digital whiteboard, even with audio and video, we can't attempt to get this nuance or the feedback response that a person-to-person meeting allows. There's no way to send that much information successfully.

    That's why no digital whiteboard will ever beat the real thing. Because these solutions do not allow you to see each varied nuance and react to them, and allow the other parties to do the same in turn. That's why a person-to-person meeting takes 5 minutes to cover what would go 30 minutes in a phone call. Or why video calls always seem to take far more time than you've allocated. That's why all those business types are always doing face to face meetings and ignoring 90% of our technical advances down here in the trenches of engineering, where we're trying not only to solve a problem with technology poorly, but we're not even aware of what the problem actually is.

    Let me sum it up for you; there is no technological replacement that comes close to the clarity and efficiency possible - and likely - in a face to face.

    • Those bits of communication that only come through face to face can be substituted by more technology. Someone in a teleconference doesn't need to read my facial expression when drawing if I then say "Wow, holdup, I don't understand." There's a whole different method of communication when it comes to having an effective meeting that isn't face to face. Things like going around the table person to person and addressing each person individually, asking for confirmation of something being understood, not assum

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Gim Tom ( 716904 )
      This may be true for a meeting with all or mostly technical types, but throw in a pointy haired manager or two and the information exchange bandwidth goes asymptotically towards zero.
  • This is from a few years ago. Carnegie Mellon developed a low-cost multi-touch whiteboard using the Wiimote. It's low cost and would require only a little more pretty straightforward work to share over an internet connection. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • Whiteboard Substitutes For Distributed Teams?

    Videconferencing + whiteboard. It's a very common combination (as it is no longer uncommon to work with remote teams.)

  • Our startup in Boston ( http://www.rocketboard.it/ [rocketboard.it] ) is actually working exactly on the product you describe, in our previous jobs we've encountered exactly the same problem running scrums, which gave us this idea. We're currently going through a private beta but plan to open it up to the general public in the next few months. The app runs on your phone and detects + processes any board it's pointed at. By processing I mean fixing aspect ratio, removing shadows, glare, presenter, and enhancing the colors. T

    • I saw your video - it looks very interesting. Any idea about pricing and availability?

      • It's not set in stone yet, but we'll probably have a freemium model, where sharing it with 5 or fewer people will be free and having more than 5 viewers would require a subscription (i.e. $5/month).

    • Any thoughts on how to let multiple people work on the same (virtual) whiteboard with your product?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shados ( 741919 )

      Looked at the site, can't wait to be able to try it (signed up on the site to hopefully get in the beta eventually).

      We're also in Boston and starting to have remote teams/offices, but full digital whiteboards are a little too much for us. This looks like a sweet spot.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nmb3000 ( 741169 )

      Pretty interesting concept and if it works as well in the real world as the video portrays, it could be very cool to use. I was all ready to sign up for early access and talk about it with my team on Monday, until I saw your comment below that it only works on Apple devices.

      In the tech and development world (especially in the trenches) Android rules, and our office is no exception. What a downer.

  • Checkout Epsons new web connected projectors. Functions like a Smartboard but can be attached to a network for remote and multiuser

  • HP Sprout (Score:3)

    by davide marney ( 231845 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @03:41PM (#49155043) Journal

    https://sprout.hp.com/us/en/ [hp.com] This is what you need: a touch/draw surface for you to draw on, but overlaid with a video projection of what everyone else is drawing.

  • I'm still sad they abandoned/scuttled that project.

  • Google (Score:3)

    by darkain ( 749283 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @03:57PM (#49155093) Homepage

    My team is spread all over the world. We've managed to do quite well using a combination of Google+ Hangouts (with their various interaction plugins) and Trello.

    We use G+ for those real-time drawing and thinking sessions, and then once we get all of our thoughts organized and shared with one another, we push it out to Trello for long term storage and project management tracking.
     

  • It's people like you that cause global warming and will make all the northern forests to die off. People have such a warped sense of entitlement. Just because you can hire someone in another country doesn't mean you should. Just because you can easily drive from downtown to your house in the suburbs doesn't mean you should. There is absolutely no reason you can't get good people that live near you. You have no sense of community or socialization. If something is too far to bike to, something in your

  • I'd think using pen/stylus tablets to scribble diagrams and then emailing or messaging those amongst the team members would be about as good as you can get, unless you can find a software package that would let the people share a drawing space using individual tablets. I've long wanted to get one of the Samsung tablets just for that purpose.

  • I reviewed 30 offerings for my office. None pleased everyone or most. If you have just a few office locations, Smart makes great connected whiteboards. It's hard to find better. If you have work-from-home or people want to use iPads and whiteboards at the same time, or you've got paper-only constituents, it's a complete mess. Might look at Groupboard or Board thing.

  • Have you thought about Microsoft OneNote? It is free now. All you do is everyone opens the same file over a network share. If you have touch screens or graphics tablets, you can all draw at the same time. It only takes a second or two to catch up.

    • You're going to get crucified for suggesting a Microsoft product on slashdot :-P - but I agree with you and was going to say, it, too. We use it for distributed teams and I find it works exactly as we want. Dare I say we even use it with Surface Pros? Any tablet screen would work, though, iPad, Android or otherwise.

  • This was an application of the "Coven" research done between 1995-1999 among several European school partners. Was shockingly successful, back in 2003. Don't know if it even still exists... had whiteboards, an auditorium, a poster gallery (with video walls and Powerpoint scrollers), you name it.

    Citations: Steed, Tromp &al.

  • I'm waiting for whiteboard sized touch screens to make their appearance. I know Microsoft was working on this a couple of years back.

    This would not only be useful for long-distance collaboration, but for team collaboration as well. Image working on a conference table-sized monitor, with a common workspace among 7-8 people. I think a team like that could potentially be more productive than the same number working independently. May require a different sort of programmer.

    • I'm waiting for whiteboard sized touch screens to make their appearance. I know Microsoft was working on this a couple of years back.

      No you aren't. You're waiting for them to come down from astronomical prices. You can get them now.

  • I am a near full-time instructor who regularly teaches in multiple countries at once thanks to this rig.

    For multiple people sharing the same whiteboard, I recommend using WebEx which has a mediocre whiteboard, but it works better than the other's I've tried.

  • Vyew (Score:2)

    by awol ( 98751 )

    Is what I have used. I have found it quite adequate. Hooked up a graphics tablet to my machine and I could draw like a 3year old. With practice I might get better.

  • I'm currently implementing it as part of our digital learning platform.

    Not sure if it covers all the things you need, but it's a start.

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