Working With Clients From Home

google-hangouts-iconI’ve been working on a website. The client is in Connecticut. I’m in California. That makes things a little tougher, especially for collaboration.

Tonight we worked together using Google Hangouts’ screen sharing feature. It’s like a video conference, except he sees what’s on my computer monitor as opposed to my webcam&#185.

The client was able to watch as I cropped and modified pictures in Photoshop and tweaked the website’s look. He could say what he liked or disliked instantly.

This is not the way to work through the meat of a project, but there are certain times when it makes a great deal of sense, like tonight.

We originally tried Skype. Screen sharing is a paid feature for them. We ended up at Google Hangouts because screen sharing is something they tout.

Most people don’t have Hangouts installed. That’s a problem. I’m not sure everyone wants to, or is capable of, working through the setup process. It was non-intuitively cumbersome and took too long. Until it worked, we weren’t sure we were doing it right!

I’m up for using an easier solution, but tonight this scratched an itch.

Oh, and working in pajamas is a good thing!

&#185 – And, unless he reads this had no idea I was in pajamas.