Wold Lab
Collaboration Tools
There's various tools to help make collaborating with a distributed team easier. However these tools aren't remotely useful unless people know about them.
Currently this is how most of our collaboration works. We email stuff to each other. There's a couple of downsides. First off it can be hard to remember everyone whose supposed to be included, also if someone gets pulled in at the middle of a discussion its harder for them to find the history to catch up.
Also sharing files via email wastes disk space as attachments get duplicated for each recipient.
Another issue is that email is usually "near-real time" but not always. A delay of 5-40 hours is not unheard of.
Discussion
The downsides above for email lead to a few different alternatives..
Mailing Lists
Mailing lists help with automatically send messages to a list of people, though they still can have the attachment problem.
The big problem with mailing lists is knowing they exist, and knowing whose subscribed to them.
We're currently using Mailman, though to limit spam I hid all the lists, also the user interface to mailman 2's administration and list archive pages is obtuse. They have a new version in development that looks much nicer.
Forums
Another popular choice is forum software.
This works around creating seperate message threads with replies it's similar to a mailing list, but the different threads of conversation are better grouped.
I have a python forum that seems good enough up http://brisby.caltech.edu/forum/ Though something like phpbb is more popular.
File Sharing
We have a simple solution for file sharing. Copying files to and from home directories on the cluster. This works for people who know how to use ssh and linux, but I know its confusing to some other users.
The current fileservers could be made a bit easier to use by either providing training for tools like WinSCP or just mounting the filesystem with map network drive or connect to server.
Another popular style was invented by dropbox which has a web accessible file store plus a local file synchronization tool
Version Control
Document Editing
Project Management