I work 6 timezones and thousands of kilometers away from head office. Permanently. Our start-up company has employees in 5 separate locations and it takes some solid collaboration to get things done when you don’t meet face-to-face everyday. People often ask me what kind of tools I use to keep in touch with my partners and employees to make sure that things get done.

Recently, I attended  techshow in Chicago and sat in on a “collaboration tools” dinner. I quickly realized that my work-from-home setup was interesting to others and have decided to share the tools I’ve found to be the most useful for my situation and how I’m using them.

Skype - all employees have skype accounts and we regularly chat and talk using skype. I also use a localized skype-in number so that clients and colleagues can reach me directly without having to pay long-distance fees. Add to this that skype is now available as an iphone App even allows me to continue these conversations while I’m out to lunch or strolling my daughter.

Action Method – this is quickly turning into our #1 organization tool. Simply enter somebody’s email to delegate a task, prioritize tasks and have discussions and reference files at your fingertips. Action Method also has a great iphone App which allows me to check on projects when I’m on the go. Action Method is a great example of how a beautiful user interface can make the difference. In the past, we used Sugar CRM but I found it to be too cumbersome, particularly for smaller todos. Too many fields to fill out in an old fashioned interface.

Twitter – of course. I can’t overemphasize that twitter has become a fantastic productivity tool for us. Every employee gets a company twitter account with protected updates (visible only to company employees) and is highly encouraged to twitter what they are currently doing and problems / questions they have.  The advantage? When I get up in the mornings I can see what people in 5 separate locations are doing and what happened while I was sleeping (6 hour time difference). This used to take 30 minutes of calling, emailing and waiting during morning meetings. Now it takes 30 seconds to see what everyone is doing and even more – what they want me to know! Did I mention Twitter makes a fantastic productivity tool?

Mantis – a bugtracking tool to track all the problems that users are having on our websites. Easy to use, simple layout and gives me a good overview of critical bugs as well as feature requests.

Cerberus -  Great tool to keep track of communications with customers. When your support team is geographically dispersed it’s important to know who said what when to whom. I’m very impressed with the templating features and the spam protection. We set up a two level support system in a matter of days.

ok, and I sometimes still use email but often take the written text and plug it into one of the abovementioned tools because it gives me the opportunity to manage the responses better.