Teleport
p/bay-area-teleport
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Julie Chabin
Teleport Sundial 2.0 β€” Your remote team's locations, time zones and availability
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Replies
Sten Tamkivi
The main piece of recurring feedback we got from regular users of early Sundial that you want to set your actual availability or "office hours". In a remote team, especially if people are in drastically different time zones, arranging meetings is a real pain because you never know when people have their prearranged weekly/monthly activities. For some a 10pm call is a nuisance, for another person the preferred time after dinner & when the kids are in bed. So, we built an "edit your availability" feature where you can make you intended working hours for each weekday visible to the team - this provides another layer of instant coordination and prevents any confusion of scheduling questions. Secondly, by popular demand (and we hope, some healthy envy of the real time https://teleport.org/about page :)) team maps are now embeddable to your own site for anyone. This is a great way for teams who use Sundial to showcase how distributed their people really are to their users/clients/friends and family. The live map provides a pretty nifty visual to. As an early adopted, a shout out to @GitLab - they have already embedded their Sundial map on their about page: https://about.gitlab.com/team/ The real time map updates work in sync with our Teleport Cities mobile app (https://www.producthunt.com/tech...) -- if you have that installed and enabled location tracking, Sundial will also know your location for the team map. To preserve privacy, we position people on city, rather than address level. We also tweaked the general design of Sundial little to make it look nicer - always important. And can't wait to hear for your feedback on what to build next!
Ben Tossell
Tell us what the big updates are :)
David Diamond
This is awesome, reminds me of timezone.io a product @djfarrelly built for the Buffer team. I think a Slack integration would be usefule so you could just type /teleport @ team mate and see their timezone πŸš€ //EDIT// Just saw that this product I described already exists https://teamtime.zone/
Sten Tamkivi
@david_diam we actually have built one experimental Slack integration, for Teleport Flock (https://www.producthunt.com/tech...), a sister product for Sundial that helps you decide where in the world to bring your distributed team physically together. This is how to make it work, if you'd like to play around: http://teleport.org/2015/07/tele...
Ross Blankenship
Sten, Super cool, simple UI/UX. You might consider integrating Google Hangouts or Skype API to instantly do video chat. There are some great WebRTC video capabilities out there (@peer5) and conferencing generally (@uberconference). Seems like the next logical step in the product pipeline... thoughts?
Sten Tamkivi
Thanks, @rossblankenship! We have contemplated how far should we take this as far as actually making conversations happen. Our core business is "app based location", e.g. using data to tell you where should you be, hence the integration with Teleport Flock for physical meet up planning. Call setup is a virtual variation of that, in a way, but with a fair share of our team being ex-Skype we know how hard it is to get conferencing right, so have not planned to venture too far down that route... But listening to users as always, of course.
Giulia Cian Seren
Coolio! Until now my team was all on Sundial but it was mainly for fun to check the timezone differences. Being able to express how much of a morning person you are or that you have a boxing class every Wed at 2pm makes it really useful on a weekly basis :) I look forward to the rest of the team updating their sundial to schedule the next meeting easily!
Sten Tamkivi
@madavvero thanks, and please do let us know if this update truly made Sundial an everyday tool for you, our is something critical still missing.
Giulia Cian Seren
@seikatsu thanks - appreciate how much you are social-media-approachable, will certainly reach out if I think of something! :)
Sten Tamkivi
@madavvero thanks, and anytime :) (....when Twitter is not down as it seems to be right now...)
Ronald Hindriks
Thanks for this! Definitely comes in handy when your team is spread across the globe :)
f3 gilbert
This looks great, nice one with the design, definitely looks better than the teamtime.zone thing mentioned - but their onboarding may be worth a look. There's no need to sign up team members or enter timezones, it just pulls that all from Slack. Great work, I'm going to email the team to sign up!
Raz Yalov
This is very nice. Do you integrate with actual calendars or do people need to manage it all in your application?
Sten Tamkivi
@razyalov trying to strike a balance between keeping it simple for generic work planning inside teams, and up to the minute accuracy of actual availability. probably integrating full free/busy meeting data from existing calendars would create an information overload. Hence the UI to manage rough hourly slots per week day in the app.
Schoneck Shoaf
I've been watching in the shadow what you folks have been up to. Wonderful products. Can't wait to use with our team. While I'm not super keen on call integration(it's a complex ask) I do second the remark about calendar syncing. Would make life a lot easier. My 2Β’ Keep up the great work!
Sten Tamkivi
Thanks, @schoneck