Teknograd is a small company with only 15 employees. We have a nice office in Oslo and one in Trelleborg. But most of the time we are on the road helping our customers. So it is not to often we meet up for a coffee and some small talk.
Communicating, interacting and building a team spirit can be hard when we are on the road most of the time. With Web 2.0 we off course have all the tools at hand to solve this. Or?
The problem with most of these platforms is that it brings the communication away from the internal discussions and talks. Out of this “problem” sprang the idea to build a group platform for small to medium size groups.
We have built a couple of tools to enable, promote and encourage internal communication and some mash-ups to keep the outside world informed.
The tools
iPhone – Everybody in Teknograd have a iPhone so we built a application where employees can send in messages and photos of what they are doing. The application also have a view mode where you can see that last posts made by anybody within the company.
Skype – Everybody at the company use Skype. We do loads of communication over Skype and this is for some of us the most used communication tool. We built a Skype Bot which handles messages into the company. People can send SMS to colleagues, post messages to the internal or external web pages. You can even send messages to our company Jaiku and Twitter account.
Adobe AIR client – We use both Mac and PC and having a platform independent tool saves loads of development time. This client is basically an internal “TweetDeck” for our internal use.
Server – We built a PHP server with a MySQL backend which handles all messages coming into WAYD. The server pretty much work as a Bot. It interprets the messages and pushes them to the right channel. Is the message going to Jaiku / Twitter? Is it a SMS to one of the collegues? Is it an internal message bound for our internal WordPress area?
With these tools we hope to get a better communication flow within the company. But we also hope that our colleagues will feel encouraged to post more messages to our external web page. Just small notes which can be interesting for our customers.
And yes, all software will be free!
We will publish all tools and so on as soon as they are fully beta tested. So you can build your own WAYD networks.
And yes, WAYD stands for What Are You Doing ;-).
If you like to take part of the WAYD concept please join us at http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1814477