The Google cloud

As I saw that the concept can be brought to life, I realized that we are going to need some tools to make the project work, mainly because we are in two locations, few folks in India and myself here. So better communication is going to play a key role in this whole exercise. Google came to our help! Within a day, I had set (almost) all the tools I think we would need for project managment using Google services - I created a new project on code.google.com which has lots of good and advanced features, but I was mainly looking for a platform to share ideas, a scratchpad to note something down, an issue management system to track progress and defects. It felt like one stop shopping for all of it at code.google.com. I also set up a group at groups.google.com including all the team memebers for better and easy communication. All of us are already using Gmail so there was no need to set seperate email for this project. I am using docs.google.com for sharing project documents or just to keep some notes and tracking sheets for myself which may not find a place on the project wiki. We had our first conference call about the project last weekend. We used skype and quality was excellent. Now, why we did not use gtalk? I really have no good reason for that. But we may try it in future.

Soon, I was seeing myself spending a lot of time on our code site, making wiki pages to document details about the project. We already have quite a list of issues/tasks that are being tracked on the code site. It is working great. It is doing all the things I want it to do - I can quickly create tasks/bugs, assign them to team members, comment on them etc, etc. I get notifications when someone works on my issue or comments on it. So, its been perfect so far. On top of it, it is configurable and I have done a bit configuration to suite it to our needs. I am really happy at this point even without using the advanced features like code-checkin and stuff.

Ohh and one thing almost forgot to mention, the conference call I talked about was scheduled on Google calendar!