I know some people don’t like the use of the term partner for their spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, defacto, wife, husband love of their life, soul mate or all of the above but I thought it looked good in the title. Now, I hope I haven’t scared you off yet, It gets better… I think.

This weekend gone, I got a bit of a grilling from my partner (wife). We were driving back from a nice lunch in the country to celebrate a birthday for one of our friends and I was feeling pretty good about the coming week. At some point, I’m not really sure when, I must have said something that started a bit of a grilling session. “Can you smell bacon” I hear you say? I would say just a fleeting whiff. One that you’re not sure if you imagined.

It all boiled down (boiled bacon?) to her not know what I was up to at the moment and how I was progressing. Now this raises three questions and probable answers for me:

1. Why doesn’t she read Ditch the Office to keep up?I like to think because it’s easier to get it from the horse’s mouth. I’m hoping that it’s not because Ditch the Office is boring. If you think it’s the later, let me know what you think would be more interesting. There’s a comments link at the end of this post.
2. Does Ditch the Office really keep people up to date?I don’t think so at the moment. I’ve made some improvements and will be blogging more regularly to keep people up to date, including a weekly progress and motivation post – look out!
3. How can I keep my biggest partner and investor up to date and involved?Make sure the old conversation machine keeps rolling along so she knows what’s happening. You, lucky reader, don’t need to be part of this one. There’s only room for the two of us in our bed.

Anyway, back to it. Since the move to Melbourne, I’ve started working on another idea – training businesses in the benefits of web and digital technologies.

• Skype.  This may be a little obvious, but I love skype.  The ease, the flexibility, the price!  There are other tools out there as well that all let you conduct voice or video calls like Google talk and Microsoft’s live messenger.  They’re all great.  For some reason I use Skype.  You can pick your own.
• Google docs is amazing.  You can write, store, share and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, presentations and pdfs.  You should definitely check this out as it’s great to be able to be simulataneously editing a document while chatting with someone across the globe on Skype.  It’s also great because Google are continuously improving it and it’s getting better every day.
• Acrobat.com is also great.  They’re building a suite of web base document tools that you can use for collaboration.  I must admit that I don’t really use these but they do look a lot nicer than Google docs.  What I do use though is the screen sharing tool.  This thing is great and it’s free!  It allows you to share your screen with anyone who has an internet connection and a web browser.  Again there are a number of other options available but I don’t know that I’ve found any that are free.  One that comes to mind is GoToMeeting, however I don’t think this one is free.

Just a quick post.  Hope these tools are useful.  If you’ve got any others that you think are great then please feel free to post a comment.

**Update**

Just thinking after this post that you should make sure that you’re comfortable with the terms of service for any of these services.  Sometimes the owner of the service may be taking ownership of your content if you use the service.  An example of the different approaches are the google docs and google docs for google apps terms of service.  Make sure you read and understand if you’re using these tools for business (and even personal) use.