Comments on: Don’t E-Mail It!

By: Improve Participation by Simplifying Sharing | Sharing at Work

Improve Participation by Simplifying Sharing | Sharing at Work — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:20:38 +0000

[...] post continues this week’s theme of improving the value of your work by capturing more conversations online. Let’s take a look [...]

By: Daniel J. Pritchett

Daniel J. Pritchett — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 01:42:37 +0000

So you're capturing emails at the server and piping them out into a web archive? I am not really saying that everyone ought to go and scrap their entire IT system and replace it with wikis and forums but it would certainly be nice to escape the “private by default” e-mail workflow culture we have now.

By: Louis Simoneau

Louis Simoneau — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 05:16:44 +0000

If by 'gotten your hands on' you mean 'designed and implemented' then yeah Web development frameworks are so flexible and adaptable these days that it's pretty easy to write use cases based on a company's specific workflow and implement a software solution that essentially replicates the email (or physical) communication structure in a persistent form.

While I respect the idea of making 'productivity suites' and such for corporate use, my opinion is that if you combine the total time it takes for everyone involved to learn how to use that kind of implementation, the cost will be higher than the design and development cost of a highly customized tool modeled to the specific needs of the organization (which avoids training costs by mimicking the pre-existing workflow).

By: Daniel J. Pritchett

Daniel J. Pritchett — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 01:41:47 +0000

I know there are some hot startups working on enterprise productivity suites like this, but I imagine what we'll see in the corporate world is cut-down versions of this functionality being ported in to Outlook and Notes. Have you gotten your hands on anything like this in the corporate sector?

By: rssaddict

rssaddict — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 23:19:54 +0000

Yep, the ideal is to design a web-based system that conforms to the company's workflow and fires off e-mails to the appropriate parties when it's updated. That way you get the immediacy and targeted nature of email with all the benefits of a persistent online system.

By: Daniel J. Pritchett

Daniel J. Pritchett — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 02:09:35 +0000

I find that I spend a lot more time lately thinking of ways to enable my work groups to collaborate more efficiently. The hard part continues to be finding the courage (and the right time) to call them to action.

Maybe next time you could try a Facebook group for your project rather than a Google group? Those would probably be comfortably familiar
to your teammates.

By: Brittany Creamer

Brittany Creamer — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 01:52:21 +0000

I am such a fan of minimizing reliance on email. A one-to-one communication strategy is simply not as effective as a many-to-many tool. It's not just businesses resisting the change, though. Even my project groups at UT comprised soley of NetGeners find it difficult to stop pounding out emails with attachments and cc-ing everyone. My suggestion of using Google groups as a way to write documents for an assignment together (without those pesky meetings on campus) was revolutionary! I kid, but you would have thought I'd invented a time machine the way everyone stared at me like I was crazy. Thanks for advocating more collaborative and effective methods of communication. The more momentum that builds, the easier it will be to convince people to cross over!

By: Daniel J. Pritchett

Daniel J. Pritchett — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 01:09:35 +0000

Maybe next time you could try a Facebook group for your project rather than a Google group? Those would probably be comfortably familiar
to your teammates.

By: Brittany Creamer

Brittany Creamer — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:52:21 +0000

By: Daniel J. Pritchett

Daniel J. Pritchett — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:36:59 +0000

Thanks for the links, John! I've seen a lot of posts this year about the “abandon email entirely” movement. I'm not quite sure we need to go that far but it's doing a good job of making us think. I find myself using it far too often for the wrong purposes – probably because GMail is so fast and lets me search my archives so well.