What happens at the holiday party doesn’t have to stay at the holiday party…

Most of us don’t simply celebrate the winter holidays with family and friends. We also make merry with those people, for better or worse, with whom we spend the majority of our waking time—our coworkers, or, as one might affectionately refer to them, our “work families.” Of course, the level of holiday cheer in the workplace can vary widely, and even a well-intentioned gesture can ring hollow if executed clumsily. The management of a hotel I worked for some years ago slipped each of their employees $5 in a card. This covered about 15 minutes of parking at the time in the city in question, and the gesture seemed to garner more ill will than good. Another company with somewhat deeper pockets and a less Scrooge-ish disposition rented out a museum, delighting its several hundred employees not only with a private tour of the Spanish art exhibition, but also with a tapas and cava bar and flamenco guitars.

But you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get yourself some seasonal good will. Nobody in my office is terribly keen on spending money to get Secret Santa gifts, particularly in today’s economy, and my small company doesn’t have a big holiday party budget. Even so, we’re a merry bunch, and we’ll definitely be ringing in the New Year in style, even if it’s only with a potluck-style buffet, some board games, and some off-key warbling. I’m planning to record the memories and share them with our other offices and colleagues around the country and the world. With the camera and Internet connection on my Windows Mobile 6.1 phone, I can make it all happen—without spending an extra dime or more than a few minutes of my time!

Note I’m using an AT&T Tilt, but the experience of any phone running Windows Mobile 6.0 or later should be comparable.

It’s pretty easy to do. My device has a 3.0-megapixel camera, which works well for impromptu documentation. It’s got several resolution settings and an 8x zoom to catch the action taking place under the mistletoe across the room. But the first step is to find the camera on the device and start recording the magic.

After the eggnog is gone and the festivities end, it can help to remember the good times, even as your work team returns to the grindstone. Loading the images to a photo-sharing site like Windows Live Spaces (or Flickr, Facebook, MySpace—the list of hosting locations expands every day) is extremely easy to do. You can load your images to your computer and then upload them to your Windows Live Spaces album. Or you can cut out a step and send the images immediately, directly from your phone, to the album by creating a Multimedia Message Service (MMS) message of your image and sending it to the URL of the album that you created.

To upload your photos to a Windows Live Spaces album:

Regardless of which photo-sharing site you use, the first time that you add photos from your computer, you’ll probably be asked to install a photo uploading program, and you’ll get a message like this:

Faster than you can say, “Who knew those two were dating??” your holiday festivities will be published online for you to share with anyone you like. Note that you can both share your holiday joy and preserve your colleagues’ privacy by limiting who has access to the album, using the Permissions tool found on the screen where you name your album and upload your photos.