Home office essentials

I am inspired by B's post on what he uses for his home office. I'll continue this line of thought.

Computer

This can be a laptop, desktop, a PC or a Mac. It doesn't matter. You'll need something that allows you to open Word, Excel, Visio and several chat dialogs at the same time. If you're a graphic artist you'll need some memory if you plan to work on big image files.

I like having a 2 hard drive setup with an external hard drive. My applications are usually installed on the first drive and I save documents on the second drive. I also periodically back-up my documents with my external hard drive.

Software

As a project manager, Visio is indispensable to me. I find that the open source alternative Dia is not my cup of tea. I was also used to using Microsoft Office but you can use OpenOffice as a free alternative or go totally cloud based with Google Docs. I also use OpenProject since MS Project is quite expensive.

I have Skype and Yahoo Messenger installed as my instant messaging applications. Skype becomes very important for my daily scrums with my team as we all do a conference call.

For file sharing across teams I share my Dropbox folder. This way we don't have to send files back and forth via e-mail. You can install Dropbox and it will sync your files automatically in the background or just access from the site.

Other equipment

In my case I need a headset with a mic. Yes, I look like a call center agent but this allows me to have my conference calls in private. I also have an IPad which I initially bought just for myself but find that I am testing our IPad optimized sites on it. I also have a Blackberry phone which my client sent over for testing the Blackberry application we're working on as well as an Android phone.

I have a Flip HD video camera which I used to video the behavior of this app I was testing. This is a bit extreme since you can use your own phone's video function to do the same thing.

Online tools

In some projects we do use Basecamp and another one that I'm currently road-testing is Pivotal Tracker for agile software development.

Internet access

This is the most important one for me. I find that I need a reliable connection so a DSL line is my only option. I use SkyBroadband right now but I did encounter some difficulties last week. I hope that they really fixed their plant trouble.

So there! Most of these tools can be downloaded from the internet or are items that you would normally have in your home. I think one of my next posts will be how to organize your work from home position or in other words: How does your client really know you are working from home?