We were in four rooms.
One person was upstairs. Three were in a conference room on another floor. One was home in Denver. I was home in New York.
We were all looking at the same problem through Google Hangouts.
I recorded a short video of it. Developers and WebOps people had joined the same Hangout and were troubleshooting together from wherever they happened to be.
“Guys -- this is a video I took earlier of the guys troubleshooting an issue using google hangouts. It's pretty neat to see the level of collaboration and using technology.”
“Teamwork across locations -- very cool.”
That was the subject line. The excitement was genuine.
The follow-up message was mostly a location list. One person on one Manhattan floor. Three people together on another. One person at home in Denver. Me at home in New York.
“I think its really neat to just walk into one of these and see Devs and WebOps folks troubleshooting these issues and using an interesting collaboration approach.”
That was what I wrote at the time. The sentence has the same slightly breathless energy as the video. The tool was new enough that seeing everyone use it naturally felt worth sharing.
The short video showed one troubleshooting session, not a company-wide remote-work strategy. It showed people in four rooms working on one problem together.
I sent it around internally because the collaboration itself was the interesting thing. Developers and WebOps were not waiting to assemble in one conference room. They had already started.
Four rooms. Two cities. One Hangout. Very cool.