Is Email good enough as a collaboration tool?
September 4th, 2006 (4:45pm) Om Malik 27 Comments
At Macworld, when introducing the new Mac OS X Leopard to Apple developers, maverick CEO Steve Jobs talked at length about how the Mail.app was getting a big overhaul.
I send a lot of notes to myself because my inbox is really where I need to be reminded of things. There’s gotta be a better way to do this that doesn’t get lost among the others. They show up right in your inbox but there’s also a special inbox that coagulates them all together. A lot of times we want to keep a To Do list, you can select a note and say make it a To Do and they show up like this. But it’s even more powerful than this. I can take any email, any document and say make it a to do. But it’s not just Mail. Any application can tie into it and contribute To Do’s and view To Do’s. [via]
Apple’s decision to focus on the Mail InBox is actually pretty astute. I spend almost all my time in the email application, and have put together a rather but working hack using smart mailboxes, rules and other helpful tools to make sense of the daily torrent of over 500 email messages. The good (or bad) news is that many of us actually do use our “inbox” as our communication dashboard. Anne Zelenka points out that there are many reasons why email, despite its short comings has become a collaboration tool for many of us.
But there’s got to be a reason it’s held ground against allegedly more advanced tools, tools like bulletin boards and groupware in the nineties, blogs and wikis and enterprise document management now…Email suits the individual better than any collaboration software, because individuals have control over their inboxes, their archives, and who gets mail from them. In many cases, individuals can choose what software they use to access their mail and they can customize the email client with filters and rules.
There are some tips and tricks to making your email life better, writes Glenn Wolsey. I am taking this one to the heart.
Keep your inbox clear, do not be tempted to use it as a storage box. Each evening before you log off the computer make sure there is nothing left in your inbox. Go through each and every email and file it. Place it in its respective folder, or if it requires actioning put it in your Follow-Up, Interesting or To Do folders.
How do you collaborate using your email inbox?
27 Comments Post your own comment
Keentent » Web Worker says: September 5th, 2006 3:35am
[...] Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive Is Email good enough as a collaboration tool? « [...]
Yehudah Goldstein says: September 5th, 2006 3:42am
Apple Mail is crap, especially for IMAP. I use Thunderbird.
Kevin Ruston says: September 5th, 2006 4:02am
The revolution for me in communication and collaboration has been Google’s gmail. It look’s kind of awkward at first, but once you start using it as your #1 email service and relying on it that you realize it really is a step up from everything before. With chat discussions saved and searchable, conversations grouped (this stops you in box filling up with a new line for EVERY single email; you just have a new line for each new conversation. And once you trust the search rather than worryinging about archiving, tagging, deleting and folders or other ways to desparately organise your email ( always a losing battle, like trying to create and file a note of every thought or conversation you have in a day) then you can relax finally about it. Plus the killer app for me is fantastic, fast, completely synchronised mobile access via pocket IE; add to that calendar and map integration, great handling of attachments and images, including processing word and powerpoint files into text for mobile browsing, and I have pretty much found my utimate collaboration and communication platform, finally!
This relates to my favorite stat of all time :-) - In a study from the early days of efficiency in paper offices they found that when something is filed incorrectly the first time, it takes not twice as long to retrieve and re-file, but fully 18 times as long, as someone first has to notice it’s wrong, then check with the original filer whether it is really wrong, then go back and find where it really should be etc etc. Once the action is removed from the ‘flow-context’ it becomes a much longer process. To me that’s why we can’t ‘manage’ our email, and one reason why Gmail works so well.
Amit Bhowmik says: September 5th, 2006 4:18am
I hate the idea of using multiple apps for email, note sotring, addresses, RSS etc. I prefer a one-stop suite to get all this into a single location.
I currently use OPERA 9.01 and can honestly say its one of the BEST internet productivity suites out there. The mail folders, RSS, notes, bookmarks, widgets, panels, filters, address book and labels are ALL there in a neatly organised UI.
Whem I’m surfing, RSS reading, emaling etc, I copy quick notes into the notes section by simply right clicking and “copying to note”. I can later choose to email the note itself or use it elsewhere.
Labels are an added benefit…. i can label emails/notes with pre-defined titles like “important”, “todo”, “funny” etc.
Overall….. an awesome suite for heavy duty net/email/rss work!
Zvi Cohen says: September 5th, 2006 6:18am
Opera’s mail client has serious problems with IMAP and no HTML email sending, so it’s useless for business purposes.
elsua: The Knowledge Management Blog says: September 5th, 2006 7:28am
Email: The Good Enough Collaboration Tool - Is It Really?
Is e-mail a good enough collaboration tool that we should all be making use of ? Or shall we start looking for something else, i.e. social software, to replace e-mail as our preferred method for knowledge sharing and collaboration. What do you think ? …
Bernie Aho says: September 5th, 2006 8:43am
Email certainly isn’t good enough when dealing with some types of attachments that require a response or comment. This is especially true in the management of marketing materials, designs and packaging…You just can’t control what your recipients will see html? text? will the attachment get blocked by their server? Email is broken for this purpose. I actually helped to start a company/application around this problem. Mostly based on the frustrations designers have with collaborating and getting decision support using email. No one has the same experience with attachments and its hard to describe visual changes to a advertising piece. With people working remotely this is almost impossible especially with non designer or tech savvy executives.You get responses like “looks good”. These people don’t need much more than a few simple extra tools. Maybe someday email will evolve to a point where you can collaborate in real-time right in your email client.
Erik says: September 5th, 2006 10:33am
It depends on the email program. I’ve found it very easy to collaborate on personal projects using Gmail, because of the excellent search abilities, calendar, etc. Sadly, at my own job we use Lotus Notes, and anything sent to me is as good as lost after a few days of mail builds up.
pwb says: September 5th, 2006 11:43am
“Apple’s decision to focus on the Mail InBox is actually pretty astute.”
“astute” or “long overdue”?
Central Desktop Blog says: September 5th, 2006 6:36pm
A Reminder that Email Is a Horrible Collaboration Tool
Earlier this year, we wrote about both “The Good in Email” and “The Bad in Email.” Both articles criticized and hailed the …
Social Infrastructure says: September 5th, 2006 11:07pm
Email is good enough for most workers’ collaboration needs but how do we make it better?
Joshua 'Z' Hernandez says: September 6th, 2006 12:11am
ummm no its not .. in my case i dont want to spend more time managing my own email to make it manageable .. so i use Basecamp with my partners, clients and freelancers.
Its expensive compared to email but it really kicks alot of ass in regards to keeping people up to date and other assets and resources organized.
http://www.basecamphq.com/
Nitin Borwankar says: September 7th, 2006 2:58pm
Email is great for 1-1 communication but needs something like a cross-platform open standards based *personal* version of lotus notes to make it a collaboration tool. Group context is weak in email.
Tony says: September 8th, 2006 3:49pm
I agree about centralizing the emails, To-Do’s and calendar. At home, I use Outlook with the Gettng Things Done (GTD) Add-In. At work, I am stuck with Netscape email or a web based version that is not integrated with other apps like calendar or task lists. Collaborative reviews in Acrobat become hampered by an old outdated email system client.
I have been using Gmail more and more and just started using the GTDGmail FF plug-in. This makes GMail even easier to use as a way to organize using custom labels, filters, etc.. Worth checking out if you GMail and are a disciple of David Allen’s GTD.
Tony
“TSG”
Bertil says: September 9th, 2006 4:43am
The best I have seen recently is the Gtalk foot in Gmail: both are great, but the idea I really like is that you shoudl first who you want to contact, then have his availbilty details, and decide from there to talk, IM or mail. The guy who makes this work in a cell phone is a billionnaire — I imply that the cell phone can fill in the availabity details himself, from motion and geolocation.
karl says: September 11th, 2006 6:21pm
I do NOT have an inbox and Mail.app is my central work application. :)
That will require a bit of explanation, I guess. I’m using a procmail rules to distribute all emails coming from one month in a dated folder on my imap account. It means that a folder hierarchy 2006/08, 2006/09, and so on.
So everything is coming in one mailbox, the one of the month. They key of my way of working is SMART mailboxes. There are smart mailboxes for anykind of things I want to do and read, for mailing list, for people, etc. It means that an individual mail can be at different places at the same time. Because smart mailboxes are based on the data (metadata) and not about the location where the mail has been sorted out.
Smart mailboxes have multiple criterias and you can make one with show me all mails of this person but only for the last two weeks, etc.
Boris says: September 11th, 2006 6:22pm
I use Mail with MailTags, which binds it to iCal.
Ideally, there will soon also be a plugin for AddressBook-aware SmartMailboxes too. and other such stuff.
To Do’s? W. ;)
mind this - by Lars Plougmann says: November 13th, 2006 6:22am
The 10-to-1 rule of email project management: Follow up
In August of this year, I published some thoughts on how effective email is when it is used as the only or main communication tool for a project. The post became part of a discussion on multiple blogs so I
Best regards says: November 21st, 2006 3:36pm
Nice site.
ultram
best regards
Michael's Thoughts says: December 11th, 2006 10:14am
Email vs. Collaboration Technology: The Big Match, Dec 12
There has been a good debate in the blogspace during the previous 3-4 months regarding the good and bad of email as a collaboration tool, and I’ve stayed out of it until today. My intention in this post is to
Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive Why Instant Messaging is Better for Collaboration than Email « says: January 6th, 2007 4:38pm
[...] Instant Messaging is Better for Collaboration than Email We’ve wondered before whether email is good enough as a collaboration tool. What about instant messaging, like Google Talk or AIM? A study out of Taiwan that Lifehacker [...]
Abby says: January 30th, 2007 12:47pm
Not bad, it really can occur
Ahna says: February 25th, 2007 8:35pm
Is it ok?
Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive Six Tools for the Post-Email Era « says: March 15th, 2007 8:35am
[...] We can see hints of the post-email era in tools that are under development or available right now. Let’s let these tools suggest to us how we might move beyond email as a good enough collaboration and communication tool. [...]
Gil Heiman says: March 15th, 2007 4:36pm
Email is definitely here to stay, however, I believe we will spend less time on email and prioritize our time on more pressing matters accessible via other solutions.
More specifically, in the context of teams, where email truly lacks, solutions such as our free flagship solution, Collanos Workplace, will allow users to shift their attention and time to higher priority issues making them significantly more productive and realize the benefits of a true team collaboration solution.
Being a P2P (peer to peer) cross-platform (Mac, Linux, Windows) application, users will have a much better experience both by having offline and online access as well as the user experience they are so familiar with from other standard applications residing on their computers.
The more a team player you are the less time you will be spending on email and realize the benefits of a solution built for teams.
Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive A CIO Revolutionizes the Rules of Email « says: May 1st, 2007 5:49am
[...] up email strikes at the main problem of email as collaboration tool, that is, that our archives are only available for our own reading and perusal. It turns email into [...]
basetta says: May 2nd, 2007 12:32am
I have a lot problem with mz inbox. Too much stuff stuck there.