3 ms·
(disclaimer: I'm a MS employee blah blah) You'd be surprised how good many MS tools make remote development/communication. I don't work at MS HQ in Redmond (I
by altano 13y ago
(disclaimer: I'm a MS employee blah blah)
You'd be surprised how good many MS tools make remote development/communication. I don't work at MS HQ in Redmond (I'm in Boston) so my whole team does tons of work with people remotely every single day.
For example, Lync on the Windows Phone is really great: you can join a meeting from your calendar/meeting reminder and instantly get video or a PowerPoint slide deck. I am frequently running late to a meeting in the morning so I just dial-in on my phone while I walk to work.
Remote desktop performance is good enough to actually code on, which I never found to be the case with VNC (even TightVNC which was darn good and I was happy to rely on for everything but coding). This is huge for me since all of my development machines can be headless (no kb/mouse), for use remotely or in my office.
Outlook makes starting an online meeting/conference call one click.
I don't think Roundtable devices are for sale anymore, and they don't always work which is really annoying, but they work most of the time and make conference calls with video and lots of people really good.
Screen sharing over Lync isn't super amazing (I don't even think you can go full screen) but it's so convenient I use it frequently.
Presence is baked into everything really well, so if you're actually using MS for everything you will get presence everywhere. It's also pretty good about being more than just presence, so you get pictures/avatars, online status, location, out-of-office messages/status, quick links to start an email/IM/etc.
As for non-MS software, I really like using Sublime Text as a code navigator. It has AMAZING performance when browsing code on a network share. I can load all the MS Office code from a remote development machine, over the network, into Sublime Text and the file-search works within seconds. I have no idea how it indexes all the files so quickly.