What works great for us is goto meeting. I work in a government organization, and am working on a project that consists of different government portions plus industry. We use gotomeeting for documentation reviews and project status meetings. This is really useful in allowing four to six different locations to interact without the need for travel. In that respect, it saves a lot of time and money. But its ease of use can also be a drawback, which results in more meetings than are really necessary. So, you take the good with the bad. In the end, I would rather sit at my desk through twice as many meetings than traveling each week.

In our organization, we were using a custom project/task tracking tool, which was required for all employees to use. The end product was to generate metrics across the organization for upper management use. This became a big issue, because the product was not very reliable or useable, the data fields required were too cumbersome to make it useful for everyday use. So you ended up updating status twice, once to your own system and once to the organizations system. To compound matters, there was a lot of pressure from management to ensure it was update weekly, and that nothing was overdue. Suffice it to say, the whole goal from the workers perspective was to just meet the requirements and leave the tasks as general as possible, which I imagine didn't generate meaningful metrics either. I think management finally caught on and decided to scrap the system. Good thing for now, except the reason the old system was scrapped was so that the managers and project managers could take extensive MS Project training for the next version of metric generating system. We may be wishing for the old system in the end.