The office water cooler is the traditional place within a company where co-workers mingle informally and talk about things like "Did you hear Joe was promoted?", or, "Wow, what an ending to the game last night, huh?". It's an integral part of the social aspect of working in an office environment, and a great way to share ideas, ask questions, or just connect up with others.

But what if you don't work in the same office as most of your colleagues? Suppose you work from home, work from a remote office, or travel for business the majority of your time? You tend to miss out on a lot of informal discussion that occurs naturally within the four walls of the office.

That's where a solution such as OnePlace can step in and fill a huge gap for these kinds of workers. It can become a virtual water cooler, providing a place online for everyone on the team to meet up and chat.

An easy way in OnePlace to create a virtual water cooler is to create a dedicated workplace that everyone on your team belongs to, and then hold discussions within that workplace that parallel the types of conversations typically held around the physical water cooler. For example, here at Riverock our water cooler workplace has the following discussions in it:

• Feature Talk
• Servers
• River of Talk
• Need a Little Help?
• Development
• Security

The purpose of some of our discussions are obviously germane to the type of work we do (i.e. creating software), however others are general-purpose and would work within any organization. The beauty of the virtual water cooler is that you can create any discussions you like that make sense for your team. Discussions can be long-lived and wander to and fro from topic to topic, or they can be very focused and live for just a short period of time and fulfill a specific purpose. It's really up to you and your teammates on how you want to communicate with each other.

Something worth pointing out is the use of a workplace as a discussion container. Up until now, you may have thought that a workplace always contains projects, tasks and files among other things, or be goal-driven, meaning the workplace was created to accomplish a goal, and once the goal is achieved, no longer serves a purpose. Most workplaces are more like that than not, however OnePlace doesn't require you to use workplaces strictly in this way. They can be used to model a concept, like an online water cooler, and provide a place to put things that support the concept.

One of the advantages that the virtual water cooler has over the physical one is that you don't have to be present when something is said in order to hear it. You can participate in water cooler discussions at your convenience, and not miss a beat since the entire discussion is always there when you are ready to get caught up. OnePlace does lots of things to help you know which discussions have new messages, so you can duck in and out and still stay up-to-date with the latest office chatter.

So if you're using OnePlace with your team, consider creating your own virtual water cooler. We think you'll find that it's an easy and effective way to help people on your distributed team feel as though they're sitting in the next cubical over from you.