There are many tools and strategies out in the world focused on collaboration. Many are web based and many are document based. The fact is that both are necessary for a holistic collaboration strategy. However, many of the solutions in the market fail to address the foundation of how people work and function in the business world – email.
Email, whether we like or not, is the lowest common denominator other than face-to-face. You would be hard pressed to name any mid-sized to large business or enterprise that doesn’t significantly rely on email. If we accept this premise, then it follows that a collaboration solution must somehow leverage email content to be effective. Most people working in business are going to have a difficult time changing their job and day-to-day processes to account for new collaboration platforms. Furthermore, many of the emails that people send every day contain valuable content that should be shared with the team/organization/employees (present and future) associated with the business. The emails have information about customers and prospects, they have ideas and solutions, they contain technical solutions, etc. If the collaboration solution isn’t able to pull this content out automatically, it will take someone (maybe the email author, a manager, etc.) to pull the content out of an email, format it, and enter into a collaboration tool of some kind. Normally, these emails get filed somewhere or deleted never to be seen or heard from again.
We at GroupSwim believe this is a major barrier for corporate collaboration. Therefore, we’ve invested significant time in our solution to utilize email content. We give our users the ability to simply add the email address of their GroupSwim group to an email chain. If they an email to the group, we automatically format and organize (tag) it for easy consumption and search. This strategy makes it very easy for customers to add seed content from older emails. It also allows capturing and organizing email chains that are in-flight. We feel strongly that whatever solution a business uses for collaboration that it MUST somehow address all the content in historical and existing emails. What do you think?
January 22, 2008 at 2:06 pm |
I agree about the significance of email, but I’d actually extend this to apply to all “data exchange protocol standards”… If you need to communicate general information/URLs immediately, your tool should work with email or even IM to do so; If the information is date-based, please send it to my calendar (or email as an ical/vcal file)… I’m sick of re-inventing the wheel for each web app I buy. And it’s not just communication, but authentication, storage, ACLs, etc. If I’m a small business, I may be really excited that your solution has everything in one place, but if I’m a larger business (or a growing smaller business), I want OPTIONS.
But, specifically with email: I certainly can only rarely convince my workers to use a new collaboration tool every few years (if that), and I have no control over my outside folk. To be able to have everyone feed my system using email, I can get the direct benefits of the tool/app myself, and show that off to convince people to join me… But, if they never do, I’m not stuck. With good email integration, I can still gain the benefits of collaboration/project management whether my partners/clients/etc realize it’s happening or not.
At work, we were able to integrate a PM tool with a helpdesk and mailing list precisely because each tool could send things along an “email chain”. Would it be great to have all the features in one tool, just the way I want it? Sure! But, I like the flexibility that if a better helpdesk comes along, we can swap that piece out, with a minimal impact on the other parts.
January 22, 2008 at 3:00 pm |
Deano,
Thanks for the comment. Your points are well taken. We are trying to be very deliberate in what we add and when. Our priorities have been very foundational thus far i.e. engaging and easy to use UI, semantic technology to make best use of the content, adding email in capability, etc. We definitely want to add IM at some point in the future. We are also looking at wikis, polls, and other features. One idea based on your comments is if you are having a really great discussion about an issue, it would be great to schedule a meeting directly from the tool and add it to people’s calendars. Thanks again for the post and keep them coming.
Jason