1. Adobe connectnow/connectpro. This is brilliant, and allows bi-directional screen sharing which clients love. It's really powerful when training someone to get them to do the training instead of just showing them.

Connectnow is free, and it's only requirement is flash. Couldn't recommend it more.

This can be a problem when the users don't have flash installed, but it is rare. I keep a link to the actual installer exe (some users struggle to download flash the normal way) to send to users that can't use it.

I ask them to go to connectnow.acrobat.com before the presentation and if they can see the begin button they will be fine to view.

Not only is connectnow the best, it's free, but connectpro can scale to thousands of participants if you need it.

2. Others, such as copilot, vnc, glance, beam your screen, webex et al all have a huge number of issues in my experience. We do all our training, support and sales through connectnow exclusively now because it offers the least issues.

3. We use skype if they have it for voice, but more often than not have to call. Voice is cheap regardless.

- Weekly conference calls via video chat. For those with less budget than Yahoo!, Skype would suffice;

- Adobe Connect with screen sharing and shared chat for tech demos or presentations. It's the easiest to install and seems to work the best on iffy connections;

- Shared collaboration areas (Wikis and mailing lists) to dump things when others are offline;

- IM and IRC for "hi can you look at this?" type questions, or link sharing; and

- Conference calls on the phone for targeted meetings (the productivity cost of a phone call is too high to have it frequently - people can work on their laptops in video conferences if they need to).

Between all these things we just about got by - I'd like to add the voices in the comments saying that face time is still very important. We'd typically fly to Santa Clara once or twice a year for either an entire sprint or for specific architectural/product meetings.

- Skype

- Etherpad

- VNC (it's my policy to get clients to install VNC servers on their computers, so they can make an outgoing connection to my computer. This lets me view their exact desktop and review any problems that they might have)

- SSH to my office/development/production environments (you can set up SSH to act as a SOCKS proxy into the remote environment, making it feel as if you were physically there with regards to connectivity and access)

- SocksCap (allows you to transparently wrap any program that connects to remote stuff into the SOCKS protocol - used in conjunction with SSH)

I've found that I can generally service all my client requests and issues via the use of these tools. When something does fail bad, I have a PFY in my city who can get himself to the client very fast to resolve any issues which I cannot fix remotely.

  Answer 1: (Snarky)

  Answer 2: (Serious)

It's probably best to figure out ways to win by not collaborating in real-time.. like reviewing and continuing your employees work after they go home but before they start the day because you're in a different time-zone. Think about it - you'll probably have 8 hours to think about things and provide good well-thought out concise answers and ideas that'll get read by fresh minds. That's way better than the interplay you'll get in most real-time meetings. As to presentations, maybe it'd best to find someone that's really skilled in them and have them do the presentations instead while you enjoy traveling?

  Answer 3: (Answering the questions, pandering for upvotes)

http://Skype.com works great in tons of environments for voice and video.

http://BeamYourScreen.com allows you to show others what you've got on your computer, whether that's PowerPoint or a product demo. It even provides a no-download HTML viewer, and lets you interact if you want.

I was on a team with people located in several places around the US, and my boss wanted us to try pair programming. We tried VNC for a day or two, and after having huge issues with it, we just scrapped pair programming altogether. Are there better solutions out there?

Yugma (with Skype): http://www.yugma.com ooVoo: http://www.oovoo.com

These allow for screensharing and audio.

Yugma has a call-in number, so to avoid fees, we use Skype. ooVoo does both screensharing and audio.

We've had 3-4 hour iChats when there was lots of stuff to cover, and it's worked great. Just don't move your mouse while you talk or it'll get choppy... :)

- Confluence/Jira for wiki and ticket tracking

- Spark jabber server for chat

- I record demos with Screenflow to share with the other team members

We do meet face to face once a week. We don't have much use for video chat.