I am used to working from home or remotely and using tools to make my work more productive and easier. We are using communication tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, collaboration, planning and shipping tools like Azure DevOps, tools for remote programming like Visual Studio 2019 Live Share, etc.

Yesterday we had an online meetup with Scrum Slovenian Meetup group and there were some really nice ideas shared with attendees about how to improve your work and collaboration when working remotely. As you know, this is currently a very hot topic.

So here is a list of tools mentioned, that I think are interesting.

1. Lean Coffee Table – It lets you do focused, effective and distributed meetings. You can create an agenda together, vote and then do the discissions. The tool offers time limits.
2. Sococo – Create virtual offices, where colleagues are working in distributed teams and can collaborate like in real offices.
3. Mural.co – Collaborate visually to solve important problems. The presentation page reminds me of doing Event Storming online :).
4. I done this – Team progress tracking, daily updates, etc.
5. Miro – Alternative to Mural. Thanks to Aleš Čadež from Kaldi d.o.o. for sharing this suggestion.
6. Whereby – Alternative to Zoom, Microsoft Teams. Thanks to Aleš Čadež from Kaldi d.o.o. for sharing this suggestion.
7. … what else?

To be clear, I’ve only used the Lean Coffee Table in the past all other tools are new to me. Some of them sound interesting, but there are so many tools out there these days, that you can really get stuck. It depends on the team, the needs and situations and of course hands-on experience.

The purpose of this post is to have a future reference for me and for you. So we can always return back and remember.

To make a better list of these “exotic” tools, please let me know which ones should I add :).

Post versions
April 3rd, 2020: initial post.
April 3rd, 2020: Miro and Whereby tools added.