This week I went to the Monthly Program Meetings at BayCHI, user experience experts from Cisco shown how to apply today's and tomorrow's technologies to collaboration. As a Product Manager located in California and working with an engineering team in France, it speaks to me: I'm definitively facing the challenge of dealing with a virtual team. 

The Cisco team (Alison Ruge, Oliver Wenz, Jenni Kim) introduced problems that organization are facing today and why current classic tools are anti-collaborative: For instance phone calls can not be replayed, email messages which are usually not put in context of goal do not shared mind, produce more confusion, misunderstanding and frustration than desire to get things done and to achieve common objectives, etc. 

Key of success factors for a good collaboration are: clarity, continuity, visibility and human touch. The latter was the main point of the conference that Cisco heavily promote through the usage of video in virtual community (actually the more people consume videos the more they sell switches and routers... ;-). They want to make videos as consumable as email and demonstrated with their new service "Show and Share" that face time creates real time, clear information and minimize confusion. Videos allow complex and detailed communication where other mediums fall short.

I'm not yet ready to replace my emails by video messages (for sure the iPhone 4 and FaceTime will help to generalize video messaging) but I can see some ways to enhance my collaboration oversea:

• Schedule regular web / video conferences (my company is using GoToMeeting, this is a great service, even if I would prefer Webex that provides an iPhone App :-)
• Use collaborative tools such as Google Docs, Google Wave or Cisco Show and Share rather than exchanging files via email
• Clarify my writing and apply recommendation from the "Plain English Campaign" web site

And you, how do you collaborate with your team? Are you ready to add a more personal touch in your communication?