I found that I was getting two things from standups: knowing what people were working on, and having a natural time to ask for/offer help. So (for now) we use Geekbot, and configured it to ask everyone on the team four questions each day:

–What did you accomplish yesterday?

–What is your top priority today?

–Where can you use help/what's blocking you?

–Which of these best describes your current level of challenge: bored, relaxed, excited, frustrated?

Everyone on the team is expected to read each other's standup reports (we have 7 people.)

Isn't it too much to have this every day?

I've found that asking people every day incentivized them to write about anything and invent stuff just to fill up the question.

All the questions are optional. It's a little more than my team would like, and a little less than I would like to ask each day, so I think it's a fair compromise.

Thanks for explaining! I am not sure I would want to it this way because in my experience people tend to avoid "needless" tasks (such as reading on other people's progress :)), but it's good to know nevertheless.

When i did something like this in my prior company I did not care at all what others wrote. i would lie to my manager that i read it but i still did not care.