Friday focused on company vision - both business and technical - kicking off with a keynote from our CTO, and then Saturday and Sunday were deep dives into architecture, system integration, user interface design and process & communication.

As a company that has a number of remote engineers, we feel this is an important way to help everyone get on the same page and to encourage intense interactions and information sharing. We're going to try to do this twice a year from now on.

As a result of these sessions, we're also going to be making some changes to how we manage communication internally to help remote folks stay connected (e.g., more video conferencing, more screen sharing when working on projects, regular but brief cross-company conference calls to share business and technical news, increased use of internal blogs).

Does your company do anything like this? How do you work with your remote team members?

We also have internal jabber servers with various room so we can announce bootstraps, file pushes to shared servers or just shoot the breeze on a Friday afternoon despite most everyone being at home. More importantly we can discuss sensitive information on the jabber server and it never leaves the corporate network.

My (very large) company has become very over dependent on techology as it relates to remote workers. Some folks in certain organizations are on conference calls for 5-7 (sometimes more!) hours a day. This has become completely counter-productive. Folks are constantly distracted and the organizers of the calls frequently fail to realize that it is "OK" to wrap a call up short of the scheduled duration if all agenda items have been cared for. IM and email are just as over used and abused as conference calls.

At some point remote working just doesn't work. When you become more and more dependent on technology to communicate you become less dependent on old fashioned 'human interaction'. It can be really frustrating at times...

Technology can never take the place of face time but with audio/video it can at least provide some semblance of human contact. It'll be interesting to see how it works out for us (and of course I'll blog the ups and downs).

@all, I normally have a policy of disallowing anonymity but for this post I realize that many commenters may not want their employer to recognize them so, just this once, I'm going to allow it (although I'd prefer you used a real email address since that is not revealed and it will let you subscribe to comments without getting bounces).

I use Skype a lot because I make a lot of voice calls; however it's very frequent that I'll need to post a URL or similar so the VoIP & IM combined in one app is good.

We also use gotomeeting (screen sharing tool) and connect (depends which is available at the time) for desktop sharing although for development tasks usually voip is enough. If you need to do some paired development on a complex task then this type of screen-sharing is essential.

Communicating remotely with someone you may have met once or twice has its challenges, phone calls rather than email/IM can help, and I look forward to using video conferencing. Time zones are also an issue, I get calls at 6pm my time from people on the west coast, and I can't make morning calls or expect an answer until 11am! I can't imagine if we were global...

To keep conference calls under control, we generally have a 1-hour time limit on all meetings, anything that goes over is discouraged. And we try to avoid formal 2+ person meetings altogether if possible.

Here's a link to the Acrobat ConnectNow page: http://www.adobe.com/acom/connectnow/

It allows up to 3 people for a conference and they have all the bells and whistles that you can imagine for it.