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Sharing your task board across the globe

18 Oct, 2007
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Nowadays the Task Board has become one of the basic agile tools, and it features lots of stickies. As I was looking from my Task Board to my desktop I had an idea: all I needed for an International Task Board was a desktop background and a desktop stickies app!

“We don’t need no expensive tooling”
I use Windows and Mac OS X, and on both OSes I like to use those sticky notes for your desktop. On Windows I have used AtNotes (freeware, discontinued but the latest version still works fine). There are alternatives like StickyPad. On Mac OS X I use the Stickies app that comes with the OS. Of course the cool thing is that you can use whatever stickies app you like best, or even have several running at the same time…

So there you are: all you need for an electronic task board is a desktop stickies app and a desktop background. What’s more, if you share the desktop with VNC, Remote Desktop or a similar application, you can cheaply and easily share a task board across the globe.
The international version
So, you’ve got your taskboard. To turn this into an international task board all you need is a remote login solution like one of the many VNC clones or Remote Desktop. Now all you need are some spare machines and a direct, secure connection. My favorite solution to create a secure connection by two non-server machines over the internet is Hamachi. Create a virtual VPN, use Remote Desktop to log in to the machine hosting the Desktop Task Board, and you’re good to go.
In Summary
I’ve always been sceptical of tools: in the Rational Rose era I found that if you couldn’t model with Visio and Word, you couldn’t model at all: Rose got in the way more than it helped. This low tech task board has that same feel for me: I can understand the need for tooling to support large agile projects, but I’m determined to put that moment off for as long as possible :-).
So you need:

Happy task boarding, and don’t go fighting over mouse control, okay? 😉

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