There is great pleasure in finding a new tool that makes life easier.  You know, the kind of tool that after you use it,  you wonder how you lived life without it. 

We have team members working from home and from one of our two offices.  We currently have people working in California, Utah, and Arizona, as well as some engineering work being done in Nepal.  We expect to have people working with us across the country and around the world.  So some of our favorite tools are the ones that help us work in this geographical disparate (not desperate!) model.

Here are some of the tools that we use:

Skype - We use both chat and VOIP features constantly, throughout the day.  We love Skype - we have virtually eliminated our long distance bills.  It is so much easier to click on a co-worker, have it immediately ringing and talk for a minute and then hang up. No looking for a phone number, no waiting for the phone connection.  You can even upgrade to get voice mail.  The conference call feature is also indispensible for us.  Setting up a conference call using the office phone system required a pHd in telephony (and I used to own a call center!). Setting up a conference call with Skype is super easy and you can have up to 5 different people on the call - just right for a small team meeting.  We also have used the SkypeOut feature, which allows us to call any phone number for very low per minute rates.  We love Skype. ExPatFacts tells about the value of using Skype when communicating overseas.

MovableType - Our blogging platform is MovableType.  We are glad for the plug-ins out there for it and use a number of them.  We struggle with moving text from Word to MT and find the font format gets screwy sometimes with these cut and paste moves.  We are excited to see what Comet has to offer.  The openness of MT has been critical for us as we are building an application on top of MT for an interface for our authors.

Writely - We have used Writely more and more for online document collaboration and find that it really has been very useful.  Instead of writing something in Word and emailing multiple versions to a number of people over and over again, we can write it on Writely, invite those who we want to collaborate on the document and then allow for the team to edit and modify the same document.  Sometimes I do wish it was easier to track document changes (you can do it, but it is a manual process), like you can do in Word, but for the most part, I prefer Writely for group document collaboration than Word.  BusinessBlogWire reviews Writely as well as Writeboard.

Technorati - While this isn't really a tool per say, we do spend time looking at Technorati.  We have claimed all of our blogs, follow selected Watchlists, and use this to try to quickly respond other posts that have linked to us.  We also like many of the new features that are coming out.  BusinessBlogWire examines some of these new features.

We have built a number of custom tools that we use, including access to a VPN where we can store critical documents, reports, and other programs that are jointly used.  We think our customized reporting system is one of our real competitive advantages. 

What tools are you using?