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Methods for Information Distribution?
Prep asks: "We're all faced with a glut of information. Everyone where I work seems to use email as their primary means of information distribution. However, thanks in part to huge file attachments and a massive influx of spam, email delivery times are now apparently exceeding the times that our user base deems acceptable, so I've began to wonder about other means of informing users of changes to information they deem important. Ideally, the user would subscribe to various feeds (changes in their network share filesystem, various intranet webpages being updated, RSS feeds, etc) and notifications of changes to those sources would be pushed to them on an automated basis. I'm wondering if an IM based solution might not be useful here. I can't imagine this is an isolated problem, and wonder what other /.'s are doing to address it."
Basically, we're back to the classic idea of 'agents', things that hunt down info for you, then distill it and order it and present it to you.
Fascinating field, but darn tricky. New waves of paradigm shifts (okay, jargon changes) come and go, but the need for good agents remains.
Currently, the best agents are still, well, graduate students and secretaries.
A.
We're about to try a different way of communicating with the client about project status and issues. We're going to use a blog system, allowing posts and responses to issues as they arise. We plan on using Squishdot in Zope.
A full-blown problem tracking system is more than we need, but email makes it somewhat more difficult to ensure that everyone involved can see and participate in a whole thread about an issue. We can also set it up so people receive an email to notify them when someone has added to the thread. We could even set it up as an RSS feed as well, (though we don't plan to use this feature).
Email just doesn't seem to be the most effective means of making sure everyone in a group is on the same page. We'll see how the blog approach works out.
Facts are stubborn things.
True, email is a great way of broadcasting information using little effort on your part. However, there is an even easier solution: use the "page" feature on your office phone!
You'd be surprised at the response you get. Everyone in the company will get to receive your important information. I use page for everything:
"Hey, there's a new memory leak in our code! I think it has something to do with the GUI. Whoever screwed up, please fix it right now. Some of us are trying to work!"
"Just wanted to let you all know that I'm uploading a change to TreeViewWindow.cpp right now!"
"Can one of you secretaries put some new coffee in the coffee machine in the kitchen? We're all out."
It's unfortunate that technology has blinded so many of us to much simpler solutions to our communications problems. The next time you need to disseminate information to your work associates, don't use email: hit that page button instead!
GMD
watch this
At my company we use WikiWiki for documenting everything from internal code management procedures to HR policies. It works great.
However, I work at a pretty small company. I don't think that a WikiWiki site would serve the needs of 5000 employees, simply because you don't get the "personal responsibility factor" check and balance for making changes to the Wiki. I can see it now....Fred in accounting says that we all get 20 weeks off a year! Horray!
Then let them include links in email rather than the actual attachment.
The solution is not in accepting the deplorable state of affairs but in addressing them and making the net work as it should.
As far as spam goes, one can only hope that local legislation in the US and other 'awake' countries can curb it. And I'm not against these 'vigilantes' who attack the spammers with their own weapons.
As far as brain-dead users go, who attach humungoid files to what in essence are electronic postcards, and thereby ruin the SMTP traffic, one can always suggest education, remedial IT kindergarten and playschool, or why not a lobotomy.
People can always be stupid, and when it comes to computers they can excel at this, but there is never any justification for accepting this deplorable state of affairs and compensating for it.
more links to shared-drive files rather than copies of such in the emails
create a web page that scrapes/shows the timestamps on files/urls. allow users to add/remove items on this list (self-customized per user)
focus employees to avoid "CC to all" mentality unless collaborative work is actually going on. "FYI" emails are best put on a bulletin board or bb-page
break employees into stronger focus groups that work within themselves and deliver results on a set schedule (1x a week, month, etc)
tighten the spam filters
update everyone's email address names and have them send out a notice to crucial clients
employ a local web-based email system, save your network's bandwidth for when people really download the attachments
encourage more IM-based conversations (more immediate, more collaborative) over email
NNTP. Old fashioned newsgroups. How many companies resort to long meetings, or wide distribution of voice mails, or e-mails cc'd to everyone under the sun? These are silly abuses of technology, and they don't make sense.
NNTP is what you need for distribution of information. You can set up newsgroups for every possible special interest in your company.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
You really haven't provided enough information for anyone to thoughtfully respond to your question. There are thousands of ways one might notify people of changes. Before offering suggestions, one would need to know what information is changing, how important it is for your users to know of these changes, frequency of the changes, technologies that dominate your work culture, etc.
Example: You user base might be interested in real time stock ticker feeds and news about their company. Real time stock feeds are well, real time. They really don't lend themselves to an email or IM solution. News feeds, on the other hand, could be used in both - or posted to a custom page on an intranet site, flashed as a network message, added to a text logfile on the user desktop or a thousand other things.
From what you have said, it seems like email and the intranet dominate your work culture. It also sounds like people are mailing multiple version of files around. Maybe the answer to your question is more fundamental, perhaps something like CVS that would be relevant for your work environment?
In any event, you need to clarify more before you are going to get any useful information fronm the slashdot community.
Email lists and web sites are different. They are different in style of interaction. They are different in the way they present information. They are different in the way they archive it. Email notification of updates to a web site should definitely be optional.
If I send updates by email, they come in bits and pieces delivered to the user at possibly inopportune times. If I use a web site, the user can view the current status when they want.
If I send all of my project updates out on an email list, the email list archive contains lots of old messages that no longer reflect the project status or design. A web site can be updated so the obsolete information is no longer there (but is available via the source control system for those who need to look at it. I don't need to read 87 messages on the hyperthreading problem and discard the ones that were dead ends to find out what the current status of the bug is and where the fix is in testing.
If I send all of my project updates out on an email list, a reader has to read them all to be up to date. A web site can organize the information so high level status is all in one place and details are available as needed. My Director can go look at a pretty page of implemented features vs. not implemented features and have nice color coding show where we are relative to plan (red is bad). We do this with TWiki and a plugin. My fellow developers can look at pages that have current test plans, detailed designs, and links to our source code repository. All of these can be kept up to date.
All with RSS feeds, optional email notification (which I find annoying and leave turned off), and a web page that shows recent changes to the web.
For all purposes an IM system is an email system which has its user interface focused on users rather than on the messages themselves. Any abuse that email systems recieve, so shall IM systems.
That said, common email systems could use some improvement, just don't expect human nature to change simply because the app [sort of] did.
Mod me Flamebait (or Funny) as you wish but here's my take on the situation:
:)
Problem:
"...email delivery times are now apparently exceeding the times that our user base deems acceptable..."
Solution:
Get rid of MS-Exchange!
I'd suggest Hotline/Openline (shameless plug).
You can get the compiled binaries of the open source non-banner clients at the following URLs: PC Client, Mac Client
And the servers here: PC Server, Mac Server
Info for the app is here:
Hotsprings
Info on the open source projects here:
Opensprings
Jabber is an open source IM and great for company use. You run the server internally so you don't have to worry about company secrets being sent via an untrusted third party potentially in the clear.
:) Online (Coffee is ready), Busy (Coffee is brewing), Away (Coffee pot is empty).
It provides "Presence" so you can see who is Online/Away/Busy/etc, which can be great when you want to ask someone a quick question. Being an IM, messages are sent promptly. I've never seen anyone spam the jabber network, and there are checks in place to try and prevent it ever happening, but even if spammers do start "attacking" you can disable the s2s component and disallow external access to your IM.
There are several jabber components out there that support sending you messages when an RSS feed is updated, these are sent as "Headlines" and many clients treat these specially (ie, don't pop up an irritating box).
There are a large number of jabber clients, and as the protocol is open, it's easy to write your own ones. You can integrate jabber with things and use presence to show status of services, for instance have a jabber "client" for some critical service (If the coffee pot is full
Jabber can also support group conferences, and can tie into other protocols (MSN, AIM, ICQ, SMTP...)
Try it, see if it works well for you.
..proprietary messaging framework that (among other things) can be used to synchronize file folders across the Internet. It is XML based, have free (with source) clients for Java or .NET, supports offline clients and works both ways thru the firewalls.
...Why not speed up email delivery times?
Seriously
I get the impression you're talking about intra company traffic, so you can do this.
1) Get all you servers to give priority to the sort of messages you're talking about.
2) Set up an extra mail system which ONLY handles the sort of mail you're talking about and have all the clients check it.
The details of this would depend on your network arch etc but its hardly going to break the bank. Also it would be up and running in days not months.
Just a thought.
IM is great for a quick note that does not need archived info, like "hey, ready for lunch?", etc.
News has many features ideal for business, and better than IRC due to the ease of following a conversation after-the-fact.
With email, if you have a group of people discussing a topic, every single person gets a copy, and someone joining in later will have no way of knowing the previous conversation.
With news, all the data is stored centrally and only looked at by people who want to look at it (ie: not pushed to every machine in the list).
With news, anyone coming into the conversation can very easily see the entire thread, so they'll be able to catch up and know what's going on in the conversation.
News is also much easier to archive than email (if needed), since there's only one copy of each message (instead of dozens or hundreds with an email list).
You can not only create per-department newsgroups, but break them down further into per-project groups, etc. (think about the newsgroup heirarchy).
If you're not familiar with newsgroups, I suggest downloading a newsreader (NOT A WEB-BASED SYSTEM!) and explore for a few days.
You'll soon understand how useful they can be
(much moreso than a weblog/blog/lg/othername).
I've seen newsgroups used in an extremely large corporation (where I used to work) and it was extremely useful.
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
At my last company, one group had set up a Jabber server, although very few folks in my business unit were using it (in favour of AIM). However, our group ran into an e-mail problem and Jabber just happened to be part of the solution.
The problem: Code builds were happening on one server (which I owned from a sysadmin POV), but the e-mails which were autogenerated were forwarded to the corporate mail gateway, and filtered into an Exchange server at some point. Ordinarily this path would take less than 10 seconds to deliver, but frequently it was taking anywhere from 20 mins to a few hours. Naturally the code builders were getting a little irate. Unfortunately, all I could do was open a Help Desk ticket with the hope that the Exchange monkeys could get the problem resolved. Setting up a POP/IMAP server could have been a solution, but would likely have met with considerable resistance.
One rather bright coder who sat in the cube next to me had the idea of using a Perl module to connect to the corporate Jabber server and send status msgs to a conference room. (I should mention that the S2S Jabber feature was disabled.) Users could join that room and see the current status, and act accordingly.
Nice features of this approach include: low bandwidth; the conference room buffers the last handful of lines, so new users joining will get a bit of history.
The postman hits! The postman hits! You have mail.
a document management system, such as those by Hummingbird
a portal, such as Sharepoint
We use both of these. Sharepoint (yeah, it's Microsoft -- deal with it) is great; it'll allow a lot of customization, looks snazzy, etc., etc. Hummingbird's products -- I hesitate to bring them up, because they're so problematic (and their technical support is atrocious), but when they work, they're rather fabulous. They also have a KM product which can crawl the DM (document management) repository, web sites, databases, file servers, and more, and present all the results in a collated view.
There is this new invention called "The Internet"
It can be used for Information Distribution.
Thanks for asking
Please put $5 into your CD-ROM drive, I will collect it remotely.
Barring performance problems like you're having, email is the best tool for this job. It's easy, everyone has the tools to send and receive already and it's easy to keep as documentation for reference.
I'd focuss on making things work while minimizing the change to user habits, since users don't like to learn new ways of doing things (as a general rule).
Obviously, if you had the budget you could throw more hardware and bandwidth at the problem and everything would be fine. Since you're asking I'm assuming this isn't an option.
Therefor you might just want to implement some policies that would limit the problems you are having. For example, limit file attachments to a certain size. If people are sending large file attachments when they could be referencing file on a local network then find a way to make them do so. If large files need shared with people outside of the organization then posting them on a website might work. Make it easy for users to do this, either through an internet or a readily available friendly IT guy (there are a few).
You will probably have better luck getting users to learn to use an existing tool a little differently rather than introduce them to an additional tool with more limitations and drawbacks than the old one. IM isn't as nice for reference as saved emails and for situations where IM is better than an email then the phone usually even better still.
If your email problems aren't addressible through one of the above described methods...well, it sucks to be you.
Get xythos or webdav.
WebDAV integrated with LDAP solved the file attachment problem for us.
xythos is a commercial implementation of WebDAV.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
You should perhaps try to use a knowledge management
system like Opentext's Livelink.
We are using it at our office and it works great. It allows sharing files, message boards, project management all from a web interface.
We now don't use email internally any more.
Have a look at elvin for example. You run a publish server, the things you mentioned are instrumented (also apps like CVS) to publish events, users subscribe to only those events they're interested in and are then notified when these happen. One notification mechanism is tickertape, but there are others of course.
Ralf
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
-Bertrand Russel