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Why Email Is Still The Most Adopted Collaboration Tool
An anonymous reader writes "Isaac Garcia, the founder of a Web 2.0 Collaboration Software company,
writes bluntly about why Email is still the preferred and most adopted collaboration solution around.
'So, why are Collaboration Software Vendors (Central Desktop included), keen on vilifying email and so quick to promise a practical alternative to the chaos of email? And, if the vendor's software is so much better than email, than why do users revert back to email as soon as they hit a snag in the system? Why do users refuse to adopt collaboration software?'"
People revert back to email because they are familiar with it.
sudo mod me up
It has worked and it continues to work well despite all the short comings mentioned in the article. Because of this people have adopted the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude.
At least that's my two cents.
So, why are Collaboration Software Vendors (Central Desktop included), keen on vilifying email and so quick to promise a practical alternative to the chaos of email?
;)
So they can increase their profits by selling businesses software they may not even need.
And, if the vendor's software is so much better than email, than why do users revert back to email as soon as they hit a snag in the system?
Because email works, period.
Why do users refuse to adopt collaboration software?
Usually, it will just be another application to learn aside from your email and IM, and doesn't provide any greater functionality.
Am I the next master of the obvious?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
"why do users revert back to email as soon as they hit a snag in the system?"
Mmmmh... i love the smell of rhetorical questions in the morning...
EMAIL Is Just that EMAIL. And the system is stressed to hell. I had a client of mine attempt to attach a 500 meg file an email.. Wtf.. I asked him if he would put a postage stamp on a brick and mail it... and quite didnt understand. Email should be left to its "mail" - dont start adding layers to something that was never meant to be.
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
You cannot get any easier than email. The collaboration software, you have to understand it and it requires more effort. However, if you just want to get something done quickly people are going to just go straight to email.
"Why do users refuse to adopt collaboration software?'"
Well, that can be summed up in a single word, "proprietary".
Steve: Gee, lets add Bob from company X into this discussion since they will be doing the design for the double ended latex parts.
Bob: Sure, I use iCollaborate - Black Turtleneck Edition V3.0.7
Steve: Looks like that won't work with our MS proprietary Subscribe and Collaborate With Those Who Also Subscribe V8.1.1 Security Edition.
IT Longhair: Well, you could all switch to Open Featureless Collaborate With Clunky Interface V 0.0.2.
Steve and Bob: Get bent.
Steve: Bob, go to the iSuite
Bob: No, you go to Subscribe.
IT Longhair: Your computers will never run right again, trust me, but you will never be able to prove it is me. Ph33r the admin.
So ends the tale of proprietary bullshit. Every vendor must foster ths because the funding, patent, and legal system is broken. Until it is changed, nothing will change.
The only question left is why people keep wondering why incompatible, proprietary and patent laden crap doesn't take off, even if it truly is the better way.
-Charlie
P.S. I personally think it all sucks regardless, but that is just my opinion.
I think this is the reason that the article is searching for.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
The biggest problem I see with users failing to accept a new system and reverting to old bad habits is a lack of real training in how to use the system, and more importantly, why it is better. People need to adjust to new ways of working, and not everyone is capable of being thrown in at the deep end and working things out for themselves. But time and time again I see projects where there is simply no budget allocated for user training, and when it all falls down us developers get blamed.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Because it is full of internets: (http://studentpages.scad.edu/~tfarre20/email_cart oon.mpg)
Off the top of my head, three reasons email rules the roost:
1. It's ubiquitous. Everyone has it, and everyone uses it. You never run into any snag because your mother doesn't use the same collaboration tool (for planning your dad's 60th birthday) as your company uses (for planning the company president's 60th birthday).
2. It fails gracefully. Everybody knows email isn't perfect, and that the user's actions have a large inpact on it, so you always plan around the fact that people are forgetful, misplace things, delete stuff without meaning to and so on. You send reminders, ask for real confirmation replies (not automated calendar updates), keep a look at the general email banter for signs of misunderstandings and so on. If an email is misplaced, it will probably get caught or planned around.
3. It has an obvious mental model. An email is a note. You pass it to people, make copies of it, forward it, delete it. There is no complex internal state to the system to (mis)understand. All functional complexity lies with the users - and we're extraordinary good at understanding that particular complex system, and indeed find it joyful to do so.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I suspect it's the feeling that you have physically sent something to a real person and seen it leave your outbox, rather than a page reloading to say "Thanks for your feedback!" and the idea that you can actually write something the way you want rather than filling out some rigid form? Pretty much the same reasons some people prefer to write letters than filling out long ludacris forms with questions that don't apply to them or they just can't answer.
With e-mail it's also easier to have a personal copy of correspondence in your outbox whereas other solutions are going to leave you with it scattered across lots of systems, websites and whatnot.
Yes, it has its shortcomings, and honestly, given the choice I would not use something as inflexible and unwieldy as EMail to coordinate groups.
But you have to look at the problems and the possible solution. And finally you have to conform to the least common denominator. And more often than not, that's EMail.
Look at your task, look at the problems, look at the shortcomings your environment has and you'll find that EMails are for many problems the only solution that fixes ALL your problems. Not as good as many other options, but at least they work.
Scenario: You have 5 people. Distributed over the world. One of them traveling all the time and the only access to the net he has is his cell. This alone puts many coop-tools out of the ability to serve as the underlying structure. A few more are culled when you look at the quirks of his cell (find two brands that work the same way...). Then have some strict guidelines that keep you from installing "unapproved" software (and knowing how long it takes 'til you get approval, you know that you won't be able to keep any deadline if you wanted to use the soft), so you could only use coop tools that don't inject themselves into your system so you can be SURE it won't interfere with other software you're using, squat, another bunch of coop tools leave the pool.
And after you're done, you're sitting there with EMail again as the only viable option. So far, that's what I've been experiencing. Maybe someone will develop a tool that is as omnipresent and easy to use and integrate as EMail, and he will definitly take the market. But so far, no such thing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why can't people just live with what they have? Email... it works. Especially G-Mail (sorry, Google addict), and with the technology we have, it's good for everyone. Except Hotmail users. But they don't count.
Maybe email is more like how we like to work. We think for a while on something, then we gather information (Google it), then we seek out the input of others (email), then we think on it some more, then we start to build/write/mold a rough outline. Then we stand back, look at it, and pretty much repeat the previous cycle of discovery and synthesis as needed.
Collaboration software seems to me more like a committee meeting. Good for getting a team of people touching the same base, but not good for actual accomplishement.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Gee, why wouldn't I want to install some potentially buggy, bloated, proprietary software, have yet one more account to remember the password to, one more thing to log into, one more interface to learn, and a whole additional set of bugs, problems, frustrations, etc., all to do something that my OS has built-in and has been an open standard for decades now? Wow these guys really have their finger on the pulse of computer user-land.
Email is everywhere, it has a low overhead, it's quick and it's simple. Most of all though you don't need to know anything about the tool you are using - it's like talking to someone.
Most of these types of tools I have tried force you to do more than is required to get the job done such as cataloguing each message. Sometimes that type of functionality is useful but most of the time it just gets in the way.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
While Email is an excellent collaboration medium in a lot of ways, it still suffers from a bit of the lag that snail mail always did. Admittedly the lag time is down to hours or even minutes rather than days, but you're still faced with the need to cover a lot of ground in your letters, hoping to cover all possible avenues of conversation. *grin* And there's still a hefty amount of people in offices out there who will duly print out and file a copy of your email asking if they're available for lunch.
So while Email remains an extremely useful tool, I think most people are moving on to some form of IM or another, for the sake of speed and immediacy. True, everyone has a proprietary solution to the situation of IM, but I think there are enough aggregating clients out there like Gaim and Trillian that offer most of the functionality (you know, like chatting through the software rather than trying to share photo albums and the like) that people are finding common ground. Now if only they could learn how to spell...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I hear the Security weenies here at $LARGE_US_BANK and the email weenies going back and forth about making sure all outbound mail is TLS (where's the Ha Ha guy when you need him), or if files are larger than a certain size, automatically posting a hyperlink, to an HTTPS website with a username/combo, which are emailed to the recipient.
.EXE and .DOC restrictions for those of us stuck in Windowsland. Invest in mailbox storage, or educate users on how to properly archive.
Blah blah blah.
Email works because, well, it works. As someone else said here, its an obvious psychological model.
Embrace it. Stop doing stupid size and
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
With email, I can collaborate (which is really just a fancy word for communicate when you think about it) with anyone on earth who has an email address. With a collaboration tool, I may only be able to collaborate with people in my security realm (company, university, etc) who have accounts on the tool. Or people who run IE (if it is an activeX based POS). Or people who are technically competent enough to figure out how to use the tool (as opposed to email, which most people by now have a basic understanding of)
:)
The only other collaboration tool we use at work is mediawiki, which makes a great way for multiple people to edit a document (email kinda sucks at that). However we still using email for everything else and nobody complains except the collaboration tool vendors
Finkployd
In my opinion because e-mail is the electronic/internet implementation of the humans most natural and basic way of communicating: person says something to one or more people. People can reply. Easy to understand the concept for everybody even grandma!
Then again, Maybe not the most basic way of communicating: still no smelling interfaces available on computers! Or are there? That would surely decrease the popularity of e-mail!
Regards,
http://www.directcreative.com/aaexperiments.html
Wrapped brick. Wrapped in brown paper; posted in street corner box with same amount of postage as was strapped to unwrapped brick. Extreme weight for size made package seem suspicious. Notice of attempted delivery received, 16 days. Upon pickup at station, our mailing specialist received a plastic bag containing broken and pulverized remnants of brick. Inside was a small piece of paper with a number code on it. Our research indicates that this was some type of US Drug Enforcement Agency release slip. The clerk made our mailing specialist sign a form for receipt.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Email is not the dominant collaboration tool, because it is not a collaboration tool. It is an asynchronous communication medium targeted at human beings.
Being a medium and not an application means that different applications can be built upon it. This is sometimes good (automated project management notifications), sometimes indifferent (your sister-in-law who forward every joke she hears to everyone she's ever met) and sometimes bad (sapam).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"Why do users refuse to adopt collaboration software?"
Because with most tools you spend more time 'collaborating' than you do actually working. You've got to love the PM's that spend so much time in preparation of a project that they miss the delivery date before even getting the programmers to start writing code.
why do users revert back to email as soon as they hit a snag in the system?
This question answers all the other questions.
Very funny.
You got the word from my fingertips. Email is the principal collaboration tool because it is common knowledge that everybody has it, and, it is more than less sure that the message will be read by the person receiving the message, even if she is offline and that is a great advantage.
:)
Even when working with more than 2 persons, there are lots of email software applilcations that make life really easy to handle them.
THere is also chatting, forums and even Voip (even with video) but they have this "live" requirment (not counting forums) and the most important thing is they are not as ubiuquitous as mail.
Do not mod me, just wanted to post some thoughts
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
TFA confuses things a bit by focusing on the features of email. BCC and CC, searchability -- yeah, those are useful, but I'd guess many, if not a majority of email users don't use them. And when you get to email clients, those things offer practically no help as to email's success. Whatever you do, don't emulate outlook as an interface (and yes, I've been using outlook almost exclusively for nearly a decade)
Yes, the author is right that everyone's being familiar with Email helps it, and it's not something that everyone has to learn; likewise with SMTP being the common thread.
But well, I think the reason's a lot simpler. Email is simply more versatile than any number of collaboration tools because it can adapt to any number of tasks, and can be used in any number of ways. And underneath that is a basic design lesson that is most misunderstood. A good tool is one that can be used in a variety of ways, and people will prefer good tools. The problem is that, in the software world "use in a variety of ways" gets misunderstood. Take a flathead screwdriver. "use in a variety of ways" means, in addition to turning screws (its predominant application in many environments), it can open paint cans, punch corks into winebottles, and, eventually, serve as a magnet. To your "office software design committee", "use in a variety of ways" means, in addition to turning screws by being rotated, it can turn screws by pressing a button, or by affixing the screwdriver into an optional clamp attachment and rotating the object with the screw around the driveer. But the minute you apply it to a paint can, it breaks.
The point is, people don't need many ways to do the same thing; they need one tool that can do many things.
So let's return to the office collaboration thingembob: the annoying thing about office software for me is that it makes assumptions about what kind of work I'm going to be doing. And somewhere, that work falls under the rubric "business", and, like the syllabus for an MBA, includes all kinds tidbits and distractions that nobody in the business world ever uses.
The point is: email is not only simple; it can be used in many different ways. In any group, you'll have different levels of computer expertise and different levels of group involvement. Very rarely and in a few fields are the two linked. If you're building software for people to work together, don't focus on "expert users" or giving anyone specific training: make it do as little as possible, as simply as possible. After all, as I tell people repeatedly, it is much more efficient for most people to know how to do a few basic things in relatively inefficient manner, than to learn all the bells-and-whistles of a complex piece of software.
Things that are easy in the IT world, aren't elsewhere. Try setting up a revision control system for editing 14th-century Latin manuscripts.
I've been through this with my company - we bought licences for Groove virtual office and all made an effort to use it for a few months. Gradually, we used it less and less and slipped back to email, sftp and rsync because it was faster, easier and omnipresent.
It's also a low-energy medium. You can answer messages when they come in or wait until you're ready and format the messages however you want. Most collaboration systems require a lot of user focus either to respond in real time or to satisfy strict interface requirements. E-mail allows people to communicate in their own way, not the way of the application.
Considering the fact that there are just over 1 billion people connected to the internet, that means an average of more than 32 emails per person per day. Considering that half of that 1 billion people uses the internet only occasionally (yeah i'm pulling this number out of my ...), that means that those who use it regularly have an average of 64 emails/day.
Am I the only one who thinks that these numbers can't even be close to reality and are just bogus?
All collaborative software I've seen require all users to be there simultaneously - just like a real face-to-face meeting.
That's what most people are trying to avoid. An email chain allows users to reply as time permits - and even (gasp) to actually think about something for a while before replying.
If something is time critical, use the phone, or call a meeting. If something is not time critical, use an email chain. I don't see any hole in that logic that is filled by any sort of collaborative software.
I have important information re your v1@gr@ order.
Stupidity... has a habit of getting its way.
Email is like a habit-worn old friend to many people. Email is in the computer-public consciousness... People who would go into convulsions if asked to FTP something - can still understand (basically) and can use email.
i nd-the-time types of folks. People can organize their emails in a fashion with which they are comfortable, when they're ready to do it. How often do people see letters from friends or co-workers at all hours of the night and weekends - because the sender has just gotten back from a trip/just got caught up with their day/just found the time to go through their mail and get it handled?
Collaboration systems are often really cool, and are often loaded with lots of features - but at the end of the day, are also often cumbersome (from a work-flow perspective, ironically) and are often proprietary.
(MOST) people are generally procrastinators or are at least I'll-get-it-done-when-I'm-good-and-ready-or-can-f
PTB Email: click send and the ball is in someone else's court... This is hugely common... It is pseudo-interactive at best, but gives the sender control over when things will occur, and gives the receiver control over when reaction will take place. Control of work flow/interaction is a huge issue for a large majority of folks I know.
Besides, you can do email from almost any networked (and user-compatible) computer on the planet, on almost any operating system, on almost any CPU... ubiquity is hard to beat.
A Passionate Independent Musician
Here's what drives me nuts about email.
"Hey so-and-so, can you download the pictures from this digital camera (20MB worth) and email them to me? Cool!"
"Hey, I'm going to email you those photos once so-and-so gets them to me!"
Let's not forget there's a network drive this could all be stored on, one time.
Too many people use their Inbox as a storage drive. And you can't get anyone to stop. Forget it, it just won't happen. We started with 250MB mailbox limits, we're up to 1GB now. Stupid.
Email sucks:
1) SPAM
2) No guarantee a message is received
3) Sometimes not even a notification if a message doesn't get through
4) Not secure
email is one area where OSS could really innovate, because a open standards, non-proprietry solution could take off if it was better than existing email.
Why can't this happen (for example):
When I click on send, the email app checks to see if the recipient is online. If they are, it sends the message via secure, direct P2P. It marks the message as having been received. If the person isn't online, it either stores the message locally and sends it when they are, puts it on a server (if available) which will deliver it when the user is online, or as a last option sends it as a normal email. If the OSS community came up with something like this, and then built it into all OSS email clients, then I'm sure it would gain the required momentum and take off.
What I fear is that Microsoft will eventually come up with something like this and everyone will end up using it because it came with the system.
Email is the TCP of human-human communications protocols via computer. (IM is UDP) You can layer on it.
Collaboration software is the OSI model. It's the soup-to-nuts model.
We all know how well the OSI model did.
SCO, Microsoft, P2P, what's your hot button?
I think it depends on individuals and what they are doing. For document collaboration we are adopting SharePoint, which is another system to learn and has its quirks, but overall is a joy to use. Users are embracing it well, with little training provided. Now, I have folks in the company that have inbox with 3, 4, 5 thousand messages, multiple .psts with additional thousands of messages. Outlook has a hard time, user has a hard time, and support has a hard time. Everything is slow; user can't find anything in that mess. Sure, there is search in Outlook, but it returns dozens of results of identical messages, that were routed back and forth between people as they "collaborate". All this leads to frustration and inefficiency.
People prefer working in a comfortable environment. Working with things you know well is confortable. Learning a complex collab product that tries to encapsulate workflow and propriatary business logic is not and---dare I say it---cannot be made easy to learn or use. Email is as easy as writing a letter, something we've been doing since shortly after the first human crawled out ot the womb of some random, doomed neanderthal.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom
Has everyone forgotton that practically eveyone in business has a universal collaboration device that predates email and vastly surpasses it in usage? It's a phone, people. And for the vast majority of the business population, communication of ideas between two or more parties occurs more rapidly via syncronous voice interaction (you know, talking).
Face to face is even better and more efficient, though clearly it has colocation issues.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Gmail solved all my colaboration needs with the message-board like organizing of email. Its exactly the type of functionality what a programmer with multiple projects on the go needs - solving the whole e-mail "hell" problem alltogether... simply better organization of e-mails. All your records are saved - you can access it from anywhere... You can share certain "threads" with other folks. ... I have yet to see a colaboration tool that does everything with the simplicity that e-mail does for me.
_Vishal www.squad9.com
"Why do users refuse to adopt collaboration software?"
No idea... why don't you ask Wikipedia?
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Everything he said applies to ICQ with the Trillian client except the market share. If more of my friends used it I'd never touch email.
The article isn't about collaboration tools, but lists the reasons why e-mail is widely used. But the summary made it look like e-mail is bad and we must get rid of it - exactly the opposite from the article. And so, we go answering the summary as if it challenged us like a Microsoft flying chair. Heh.
Here's the points in the article:
Email is Easy To Understand
Email is Universal
Email is Accessible from Anywhere
Email Can Be Personalized
Email is Manageable/Configurable
Email is Searchable
Email is In Your Face
Email Just Works
The article tells us that these are not EXCUSES, but VIRTUES of E-mail. If we want people to use collaboration software, it needs to have the same virtues of e-mail.
The last paragraph in the article says:
"Am I suggesting that we all abandon our collaboration dreams and submit to email? Absolutely not. As a fellow collaboration software vendor, though, I think we've got our work cut out ahead of us. Mass adoption isn't around the corner. In order for any of us to succeed beyond the outer rings of the blogosphere, we must look closely at the single most successful medium to enter the business world in 25 years. We must take a closer look at this killer app and apply the same rules of simplicity and ease-of-use to our own products if we ever expect to become more than a cottage industry. To succeed, we must look back and learn and apply what we've come to understand as the Good In Email."
This is probably the biggest flaw of the collaboration tools - the fact that you've got to go into the tool to look for changes. With Email and IM, if you've got a new message it just appears as a new message.
Web-based bulletin boards (including slashdot) have a basic problem. The typical layout is that there will be a set of topics. And each topic will have some number of threads, and within each thread an initial message and some number of replies. A web-board will show you all of this, every time you go into it. If you read 3 threads before, and ignored the rest, and you go to the web-board later, you have to remember which 3 threads you already read and click on them again, and ignore the threads you didn't read before, all over again. You'll see messages you already read.
This is because the web-board doesn't keep much state regarding your prior use. It may tell you how many new messages there are, but if it were email, then you'd be able to "delete" messages and whole threads which you have already seen or which aren't interesting. I say delete from the point of view that such a function on a web-board wouldn't really delete the object, it would simply mark it that you had seen it and to not show it to you again, independent of any other users.
Collaboration tools tend to make all communication public to all participants in a group. But that's not necessarily appropriate. If you have something to tell to only two members of the group, then email is the natural way to inform exactly the two people you want to inform. Forcing everybody to see everything is just information overload for most people.
A common war-cry of management is we need better communication. They believe that "more communication" is better communication. This is false. We need "better quality communication", and this means better understanding of agreements and commitments, not simply more of it.
Too many people use their Inbox as a storage drive.
:(
Ugh, you tell me. I'm sick tired of my friends sending me 2MB pps files with pretty pictures of "AWWW! Ponies!" or cutesy **** like that
Greets!
In the Journal special issue I edited a while ago was a very interesting paper on just this subject.
http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v05/i01/schraefel/
"The paper considers possible 'future everyday hypertext systems'. To ground the discussion, we look first at the functional and conceptual definitions of hypertext that have evolved in the hypertext research community. We then consider these definitions against the Web, the best known current everyday hypertext, but one that the hypertext community has regarded as only partially a hypertext system at best. We propose, however, that a full, rich hypertext is alive and well and living in an equally successful everyday system: that system is email. We look at how email meets the criteria, both functionally and conceptually, for rich hypertext. "
The problem with the rat race is, even if you win, you're still a rat!
It's probably not the sort of "collaboration software" that the blog entry talks about, but a group of writers from the RP Congress City of Heroes roleplaying/writing circle have found that the server-based collaborative editor MoonEdit can work better than email for the small, specialized uses of writing stories together. We can write and edit them together in real time, with characters immediately responding to each other, rather than trying to guess at what the other characters would say and emailing the stuff back and forth.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
The content of a medium is another medium. The content of a web page is a book (sometimes a film) and the content of email is speech. Your pithy, useful, one-liner emails resemble a bit of conversation a lot more than they do a piece of text.
Speech is electric (it was your sig that inspired me to post here). Books are not. Books move very slow and require a committee to "get them right". Speech is autonomous, isolated, demands free action. It's like the difference between cars jammed up on a highway (or content-management) system and people zipping around on their own personal jetpacks.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
all jokes aside, I wouldn't really call email a "collab" tool, i would leave it as it was meant to be, and that is a communication tool. Sure, you can send files and converse about projects which can be seen as collaboration. Still, if "collaboration software" thinks it's biggest competitor is email, then they might as well jump ship now, because email isn't going anywhere.
Anyone who dealt with business software knows what it is. Proprietary piece of code patched as hell to barely work (or appear to work), functioning just enough so it can be pitched to clueless CEO-s of various companies that have money to waste...
Unfortunately this is the case, and at the same time the e-mail protocol is simple, proven in time, open and the e-mail clients are used by millions of people world-wide and are simple, therefore reliable.
"Why do users revert back to email as soon as they hit a snag in the system?"
The better question is: Why do users revert back to sticky notes and phone-tag as soon as they hit a snag on the Exchange servers?
Or...Why do commuters revert back to driving cars to work as soon as they hit a snag in the public tansit system?
People, in general, are lazy and will do things that they have been doing for a long time. Path of least resistance FTW.
I tried to think of a good sig, and this wasn't it.
...this is probably it.
I dunno, really. Why do self-styled Web 2.0 'developers' insist upon reinventing the wheel? My god, it's turning into the bloody dot.bomb out there, all over again. This time though, nobody is investing and the would-be heirs to Mirabilis, Lotus and Sendmail are doing nothing but whining.
Most collaborative software has multiple layers to them. It seems cool and nifty, but most users don't enjoy having to pick through a bunch of screens and submenus to find what they want. A couple of layers of depth is about all most users will put up with.
If it doesn't solve a problem I have, I'm not using it.
In a large (multinational) company, you're bound to have multiple collaboration systems (per region/devision/...) and at some point an integration step will be needed. Most of the time e-mail is simply good enough.
The Network Effect is at work.
The value of a network is equal to the power of the number of nodes. SMTP Email has many more nodes than any other collaboration option. In order to eclipse email another collaboration technology must have several orders of magnitude more value per node to overcome the network value added of email.
The article got it all backwards.
Why are there other collab tools in the first place? That's because E-Mail sucks so bad at what it does, there is room for other tools!
Redesign the E-Mail protocoll to something that isn't totally crapped up by a decade of MS Outlook, supports all languages, enforce a single ecryption, request for pass and signature standard, force threading, true metadata seperation (adress based quoting included), thread-based versioning and integrate vcard, ical and XHTML Strict into it and all other tools will go the way of the dodo.
But the reality is we have a totally messed up set of semi-standards based on a design from 35 years ago, when networks didn't even exist.
The truth is, E-Mail is a bunch of crap, miles away from what it could be with an ease. Bazillions of clients, each with it's own approach to dealing with every aspect of E-Mail and no sign of convergence. Add Spam into the mix and you see why productive people avoid E-Mail as much as possible.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Email Systems use Universal standards for sending/reciving messages,whether its a Unix based system or a Windows based,GUI client or text based,all follow similar methods hence email clients work similarly on all platform,a typical client will fetch mails,write documents,delete/reply/fwd mails. Unless alternative system come up with such universal standards,we shouldn't think that people would stop using it.
This is a total cliche, but there is no Killer App for collaboration software yet, at least not one that has any traction. Killer Apps seem to happen organically, I don't recall ever seeing one get foisted upon the public that ever went anywhere.
Email is popular because it gets the job done. People like to have a "flow of conversation" just like they do when talking to each other in person.
This ought to be a lesson to people building collaboration software. Microsoft has a lot of people convinced that calendars and address books are the killer apps for collaboration, but in reality, people are looking to be connected to other people. I may be a little bit biased on this one, though, because I'm involved in a project that has built a collaboration software with its roots in the BBS world. Our user community loves it because it lets people work/play/quack together without calling attention to itself.
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You can use and abuse it as you wish, or rather as everyone else wishes.
People choose it as the panic option, as they wish to have an answer from a named person or group, rather than posting a question and hoping that someone will maybe read it, and maybe post an answer.
Psychologically it's the primal choice of personal communication over impersonal communication.
I develop "collaboration software". Actually it's document management software with collaboration tools built in.
My plan for making the software easier to implement was to make it work with email, not separate from it. Keep It Simple Stupid. Most user already check their email multiple times per day, so why create another "inbox" for them to check? It's more work, more effort and therefore simply it simply won't get done (not to mention all of the belly aching and complaining that would come with it).
It's much easier for a user to get an email that says "Joe Blow wants you to "take out the garbage". Do you wish to [accept] or [reject] this task? If you do not respond within the next [# hours / days] we will assume you reject the task. This task must be completed by [Sunday @ 5pm].
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Collaboration software sounds like a great idea, except that the more time you spend using packages like that, the less actual work you do. In America's current business culture, answering every email you get within 2 minutes of receiving it is a much more valued behavior than budgeting your time to get real work done, even if the replies you send don't contain any important information ("Thanks for emailing me, Ted. My leg of the project is in full swing, and I touched base with Hugh from Marketing about how strongly we want to pursue the 'hip' angle with this, and he says we should go all in and really put the pedal to the metal. I'm thinking we could change the whole paradigm of the way business is done around here if this works..."). Collaboration tools suffer from the same problem, since every time you want to work on the project you use the tool's interface and be pestered with a lot of irrelevant data entry. An email takes less time to send, and the recipient can answer whenever he feels like it.
As a side note, I think that this is largely because business has grown up a class of professional middle managers, who have no idea how actual work is done at the company or how to do any of their inferior's jobs, and so if they aren't constantly being told what's being done, they then assume that nothing is being done at all. The Peter Principle is now being replaced with the A.C. Principle: in any stratified hierarchy, members will enter at their level of incompetence, and get promoted.
But you have to look at the problems and the possible solution. And finally you have to conform to the least common denominator. And more often than not, that's EMail.
I agree, E-mail rules because it is works the same way on a PDA, MobilePhone, Windows/OS.X/Linux computer and it is a simple and robust system. If you, using a Microsoft solution want to collaborate with contractor X who uses an Oracle solution and contractor Y who uses Lotus notes or something else you are will be stuck with E-Mail being the lowest common denominator. In essence E-Mail is used because it is thoroughly standardized and will work on any platform, which brings us to (what is IMHO) the achilles heel of all collaboration software, it is only 100% compatible with it self. This is why people revert to email. You can't just expect your partners in a project to dump several thousand dollars worth of software, switch to Windows if they are using OS.X, Linux or some *NIX and (as is commonly done) demand that they standardize on Microsoft groupware products. The only way that collaboration suites are going to gain broad appeal is if different vendors solutions can all communicate with each other over open, industry standard protocols. You have to be able to connect to any workgroup using your favorite collaboration suite or whatever your employer mandates with the same ease that you can browse a website with any browser of your choice because all browsers use the same industry standard protocols and they all use the same basic set of client-side technologies for rendering content (HTML/JavaScript/ etc...). There may be slight variations between browsers but 97% of the time I have no problems browsing web sites no matter which browser/OS combination I am using. Until that kind of interoperability has been achieved by collaboration software vendors people will be 'stuck' with E-mail and in view of the difficulty Software vendors seem to have with agreeing on any kind of standard we will be 'stuck' with E-mail a lot longer.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I choose email because it's easy and accessible. I can get my email from any machine with internet access. And if I don't have a computer, I can get it on a cell phone. Hell even my VoIP phone service e-mail's me my voice mails! I can filter it; I can organize it; I can have a billion different email addresses and check only one box and get email from all of them.
No matter what, you won't replace e-mail as the primary means for the distribution of information within a company, or as a means for more personal (i.e. not suitable for the entire project team) communications. So any collaboration tool you put into an environment becomes yet another techno gadget everyone has to learn and use, and split their attention between. And undoubtedly if you split communications between multiple tools, you end up with part of the information over here, another part over there, and often a lot of it just gets "lost" in the shuffle. Look at communicating over IM vs EMail. IM information is usually lost when you close the window, but email gets stored until you delete it. Both are good tools for getting info around, but one is very temporary. Depend too much on IM and you lose records of decisions made or information passed. You get caught with "I never told you that..." and you have nothing to prove them wrong.
At work, I'm forced to use Outlook, and it tells me when I have new mail, sorts it as I told it to, tells me when I have meetings coming up and so long as my rules are properly setup, acts as a fairly good information sort tool. Collab tools tend to be web apps that don't grab your attention very much, they don't want to be "dissruptive" when that's exactly what they need to be.
Also, Probably 90% of my emails, even ones directly related to projects, are limited in scope to what I'm trying to accomplish and wouldn't benefit from being conducted over a collab tool space. The entire team doesn't need to sort through my thread on getting the SQL server migrated to the SAN.
We use Sharepoint at my company, and while I'm not crazed about it from a features perspective, it does do one thing amazingly well. Document management. That's the space these tools should be focusing on right now. The days of using a file share to store all your docs are ending as they are turning into a tangled mess of crap that no one can really search through. Also, you won't replace e-mail outright. You have to slowly replace it. The collab tool that has solid hooks into Exchange and provides superb integration WITH e-mail will be the winner in the space. Don't treat e-mail as an adversary that needs to be crushed, treat it as a tool to embrace. Use it as an extension of the collaboration tool. Leverage those user habits that everyone complains about, ease users into the new tools in a way that they don't even notice it. A collaboration system should be seen by the user as an extra feature of their e-mail. Then, you can start to swing more and more communication into systems like Sharepoint and eventually relegate e-mail to a minor communication tool like Instant Messenger apps are now.
But the core lesson these collab companies need to learn is that you can't expect users to eagerly embrace another tool that's tossed on top of the pile of current tools. I don't want 3+ systems to distribute information to my coworkers. I want one tool that does it all. One central system that keeps it all sorted and handles notifications. One UI for me to learn once. One tool to track so I can reduce some of my desktop clutter.
The solution to every tech problem is not always to just toss down another layer of utilities and applications. Try improving what's already used.
IMHO the answer is interoperability. You can use any mail client to send an email and the recipient will be able to read it regardless of the client s/he uses (and in fact you normally don't know what it is).
On the other side collaboration suites usually require that everybody uses exactly the same tool. That's maybe acceptable in an small scale environment or in a company but there are no chances that everybody will ever use exactly the same tool in the world at large.
Furthermore, email clients are free or bundled with the OS, collaboration tools are not.
Sending an e-mail to someone takes very little effort. You open your e-mail program, type out a message, address it and send it. Submitting a document to a SharePoint site or composing a wiki article adds an extra set of steps, even if they're easy. The current version of SharePoint is especially bad for easy editing of content...people I know who do use it just use it as a document dump because they don't like the web editing details.
Collaboration software that can accept inpot in the form of e-mails addressed to different sections of the site might fix this problem. However, the current culture says you have to answer your e-mails within a few hours of receiving them. Do we expect people to take time out, open the collaboration site, log in, get into editing mode, compose their message in whatever formatting language the site requires, then submit it?
because unlike instant messaging, you don't have to deal with it NOW. Someone can send you a business e-mail, and you can leave it there whilst you think about it. With an instant message, or some other instant-communications, you have to stop what you're doing, and deal with it NOW.
Check out what you could do to your gmail account with http://www.poperti.com/ can.
I'm a PhD student in a 1337 graduate school department, and the biggest reason people use any type of software here is because they're used to it. They collaborate with e-mail, write academic papers with Word, and use mediocre software packages to analyze all their data.
E-mail barely works for academic collaboration. People have to pass multiple versions of the same paper among five or six people, creating numerous files with the same name, which are either saved in the default e-mail attachment folder or on the desktop. It's confusing and slows down my e-mail client, which I need to actually send e-mail to people. The worst is when people try to send large data files or sets of photos.
It's a clear case where a proper versioning system would benefit everybody if people were willing to use it. But nobody (especially the big-name professors) wants to spend time learning new software.
It may be useful for coordinating meeting times, but as far as sharing files across platforms with different OSs and software configurations, e-mail is IMHO a bad practice.
What annoys me is when people send out email when what they meant to do was put a file on a shared resource, or have a telephone conversation. Just because you've emailed it to somebody doesn't mean that they read it. If you need to ring somebody to confirm they recieved an email, chances are that you didn't need to send the mail - you could have just told them over the phone.
Other than that I like email. It has quirks: it's just plain text, so its difficult to track conversations; attachements were an after thought; security is something that happens to other technologies. But thats also its strength. It will probably out live me. So long as computers are still shipped with keyboards, email will continue to be a string technology.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
When I started doing this geeks tended to be more subversive, have a cooler edge, and really innovate. These days it seems like these guys throw some crap out there, want a look over functional, honest to god function, love, and then whine saying the world is stupid and doesn't understand when no one picks up their project and loves them for it.
Some of my favorite programs were like my favorite car, clunky, held together with coat hangers and duct tape, but they wouldn't crash on you when you needed them, and if they did you could pop the hood yourself and using just a few tools take the entire thing apart and rebuild it.
Making things too complex for their own good is the same problem that both the automobile industry and the computer industry are going through. Patching layers and layers of "innovation" onto something eventually making it into a franken-beast, and one that trips over its own set of extra feet at that.
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Because this still applies.
BSD is designed. Linux is grown. C++ libs
Change management and collabration software tends to have many, many features that just annoy programmers, especially if the project isn't very big. A related item in web content management. Our company is dropping our CMS because it makes it cumbersome to update our small web site. Something anyone could change in Dreamweaver in a few minutes, takes an hour in our CMS. Email is easy to sort as it comes in, it can be searched for keywords and documents can be sent. Easy cheesy!
We run an SF/Fantasy mag entirely via email. Submissions, slush reading, meetings, discussions, the lot. Proofreaders grab PDFs, and later the layout is emailed to the printer so he can run off the job, and the physical copies are then posted to subscribers. 19 members of the group, and we're about to despatch issue 22. Some users are on mac, some just use hotmail, and it took us many attempts trying to explain IRC before we realised email was the only way. We've been going over 3 years now, and still looking good.
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then why is /. not a mailinglist?
Email has one advantage over any collaboration software, I continue to control the content (at least of a copy of what I sent). If the collaboration software doesn't maintain a record of changes made, or if it can be edited by someone I don't trust, the software leaves no "paper trail" when some middle manager insists later that I did or didn't do something. Email leaves a much better record for purposes of fending off corporate infighting. (Yes, I used to work at a mean and miserable .com, actually several. And when buyout and layoff time came, I was glad to have records of what I said and to whom I said it.)
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Functional Needs Analysis - or a product spec. If I understand the original point and the comments correctly, the problem with most collaboration software is that it gets in the way of collaborating. E-mail is comfortable, allows one to perform several tasks within a single interface and is relatively low impact for the end user. Most collaboration environments are the opposite. Sounds like the ideal would be to enable the most wanted collaboration features within an e-mail client environment. Sort of like Lotus Notes? or Outlook on Exchange? But with more user (or corp IT) selectable features. So the question aren't more complex collaborative tools successful, but why aren't we using all that processor power and 'smart' platform architectures to manage the collaborative requirements we may have within the software environments we're most comfortable. I suggest that this is where Microsoft has been going with Office System. (I think it's called Office 2007 now.) Enabling groups to collaborate in organized (SharePoint Portal Server) or ad hoc (SharePoint Services) manners within the office suite of products they use whether Word, Excel, PowerPoint or their more complex and specialize brethren; Project, Visio, Access and so forth is a terrific goal. From Microsoft's perspective the only way to get this to work transparently on the desktop for the average information worker (as opposed to knowledge worker - marketing speak that describes cultural attitudes towards people) is through a mostly proprietary architecture. Being able to interact with MS Office System without having specific MS Client Programs or even MS Server Programs would be ideal. Microsoft should be more open on the APIs involved and abide by and contribute without control freakouts to open file formats to enable this accessibility. Microsoft shouldn't have to provide support to users and vendors beyond what's required for clean open-ness and a willingness to fix those things that don't work as expected. Ahh my fantacies.
Its the most basic form of communication next to pen and paper. Even a phone call is more socially complicated. You can not call during certain hours, it allows for attachments in the digital age, I can be in my boxers as I type what I want to say (as I am now) which rules out video phones. Its simply the easiest way to get a message to someone fast. Anything more advanced or featureful will simply be overkill when I just need to give someone a yes or no response.
I was about to comment on the situation of them ignoring established appointments when setting up meetings, but then I realized that that's still a bit of a double-edged sword. I've had situations where people have ignored the fact that I already have an appointment listed for the time slot they've picked. I've had situations where I've scheduled meetings and then wound up missing half of the people because they had appointments not listed on their calendar. I've also had people who've gone beyond reasonable limits and assume that unless you explicitly calendar lunch in there, it's perfectly acceptable to book you in for nine hours of meeting in the day with some of them outside of your working hours.
Meeting requests and being able to crosscheck against other peoples' schedules is handy, but it's far from foolproof. I will admit that adding the conference rooms as "required resources" has saved a lot of trouble for us here. Now if only we could teach a few more people to actually use the system...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
The problem in this case isn't collaboration, it's the sharing of large files needed in the collaboration.
In this case, a simple repository is all that's needed to take care of this problem. Have a large file? Open the repository site, drop in the file, it returns a link to you when it's uploaded. There are commercial document repositories, and there are Open Source repositories, either of which solves the problem of putting documents in a central place for groups to utilize.
The real problem for Collaboration Software Vendors is that, for a group using a CS system, there is usually one and only one way to do things; one way to share documents, one way to organize projects, one way to build plans. All of the members of the group have to adapt to the CS. Groups who use email and calenders for their collaboration don't necessarily get all the features of a CS system, but the "system" they use is maximally flexible. User A can organize and manage things how they are comfortable with them, and user B can do something completely different with the same information.
The problem isn't inertia of users getting out of email and into CS, but a lack of flexibility on the part of the CS systems that users aren't willing to give up.
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Mental note to self: Develop a collaboration solution that looks and works exactly like an email browser
... the features of email. BCC and CC, searchability ... ... everyone's being familiar with Email helps it...
Everyone's familiar with it, but no one can agree on what to call it.
Is it "email", "Email", "e.mail", "E.mail", "e-mail" or "E-mail"?
A few years ago, we had a big, mandatory, all-hands training session on the rollout of Groupwise, with hours and hours spent introducing us to all the nifty collaborative tools that come with it... calenders and meeting schedulers and priority alerts and all kinds of crap. I can still hear the repeated refrain from the trainbots: "Groupwise is a lot more than just e.mail!"
As far as I'm aware, nobody uses any of it, except for the e.mail.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
What's the point of email if you have to call?
Reminds me of an anecdote I read in a computer magazine:
My wife and her sister were always gabbing long-distance over the phone for hours at a time, so I decided to save some money by bringing my wife into the 21st century by introducing her to email. It was an uphill battle, teaching her about the difference between "to" and "cc," let alone "bcc" but I got her using it and now she emails her sister every day. And... calls her sister before sending the email to inform her that the email is coming, calls her a bit later to discuss the email contents, and then afterwards to follow up. I'd estimate our phone bills have just about doubled since I introduced her to email. Next time, I'm just going to keep my damn mouth shut.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Each of these tools was widely adopted because it helped workers collaborate in a way that was substantially different / better than the tools before it. The article seems to be focused only on 'new collaboration software' that is trying to be a better email than email. That's a tall order.
A widely-adopted collaboration tool doesn't get replaced all that often. Telephone entirely replaced telegraph. Snail mail for letters was partly replaced by fax, and later partly replaced by email, but both require the receiver to have equipment and can't handle physical objects. It appears that fax will soon be entirely supplanted by email, but the transition is still in progress. IM has carved out a niche for interactive instant text, but both email and telephone have more features.
Whoever creates 'the next email' will have accomplished a rare thing. It's hardly surprising that it hasn't happened yet.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Isaac Garcia, the founder of a Web 2.0 Collaboration Software company
People who think "Web 2.0" is a real thing that actually exists should NOT be allowed to write articles!
There is no way to copy the location of a file to the clipboard
not correct.. right click the file, select properties.
move the mouse to the leftmost part, hold down the left click botton, move the mouse to the end, even if the path exceeds the display, you can select the entire name with path,
it's now selected (windows default, blue background, white text) hit ctrl+c
it's now on clipboard...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Most of the collaboration software I've seen is analogous to scheduling a meeting with a co-worker in order to ask a single simple question. It's overkill for *most* issues that arise. Having said that, there may be a place for using a hammer to swat the fly. For most cases, you can't beat a simple, straight-forward conversation (in email or in person).
"For many people email is the only way they know of transferring files. How else is some low-level secretary going to send a file - SFTP it to a web server and email a link?"
No argument to either the point that email is not the right way to send large files, or the fact that getting users to do it any other way is not likely to occur on any wide-scale.
Personally, I think the best solution is for the outbound email servers (SMTP) to identify and remove large attachments, replacing them with a URL to obtain the file via http(s).
This solution would solve the problems at hand:
- Sender can send using email like they are used to and comfortable with. Nothing new to learn.
- Recipients do not have their email download (POP or whatever) take forever
- Recipients can choose to not download the file, or download it when it is convenient for them
- The file is only stored once, not once for every recipient. Yeah, some mail stores handle this already, but most do not, and when this does work it is only when all recipients are on the same server.
- Recipients do not have to learn something new (pretty much everyone understands how to download from a URL).
- It would be completely automatic, no special procedure necessary.
The only downside I can think of is that this circumvents virus scanning to some degree. A well implemented solution would virus-scan the attachments at the point of stripping it and solve this. Also, a reasonably well protected PC will scan http downloads for viri.
Not a perfect solution, and there are probably some edge-cases that would annoy a few, but this is the best solution I can think of.
Just my 2 cents.
The only athletic sport I ever mastered was backgammon - Douglas William Jerrold
The company I work for, www.ike.com has been attempting to market collaboration software for 3+ years. One of the major obstacles to adoption is email. Everyone uses email.
The author of the article has some great points, but he doesn't hit on the biggest one. Nobody wants to change. Even if my collaboration system is more secure, more reliable and as easy to use as email, nobody wants to learn something new.
In many cases the lack of built in encryption in email makes it illegal for use (per SOX, GLBA or HIPPA). Despite this, many bankers, doctors and other professionals send out information to their clients without instituting any add on encryption or purchasing a collaboration solution that would allow them to meet the requirements of the law. Why? They don't want to learn anything new. email is working for them, they haven't been burned, so why change.
I think that would be a very good solution - it doesn't require any modifications to client software, it's transparent to the users and it's many times more efficient. The only difficult variable would be how long you keep the attachment available on the web server.
Before email, if you wanted a paper trail you had to send out memos. And typing a decent memo took a lot more time/effort than hammering out another email.
Don't forget meetings. With calendaring/scheduling software, I can call 20 different meetings a day and automatically check to see that you aren't already scheduled for a meeting. Before, I'd have to send out at least one memo for a meeting and possibly several unless I went to each person and checked his/her availability. And if I'm going to that much effort, the meeting was usually pretty important.
Its not clear that creating new destinations is the right way to enable new behaviours like collaboration. There is a large momentum behind core online activities (e-mail, browse, IM, etc.) that might be better served by redirection, especially when the new behaviours are incrementally accretive to previous ones.
It was interesting to see Apple expand a new behaviour (with iTunes and music purchase) into media playback generally.
--
graphicallyspeaking
graphically speaking
They (the so called collaberation software) sucks. I have actually found the what works best to coliberate is a scenic setting a nice euperiant (kava, candy or what have you). And being able to look whom ever your working with dead in the eye so that if it all goes to hell you can at least say: Talk to that other jerk off.
Unfortunately, most mail servers are not web servers. You would have to configure the mail server to have secure HTTP upload access to a web server ... and which one? Many companies have a domain only for email.
It is a very good idea to start with, but would require a lot of infrastructure still.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
How about using game engines as collaborative tools?
Because collaboration software requires everyone to have the software installed for it to be useful. Everyone already has e-mail and it does 90% of what people want to do with collaboration software.
People don't like having to re-learn how to do their jobs. They especially don't like having to re-learn them for every client/vendor who might use a different collaboration suite. So they just use e-mail, because it works well enough.
Now give me a million dollar consulting contract for telling you the obvious. You know you want to.
For unconditional email downloading, POP3 is slightly more efficient and easier to implement, but IMAP was designed with a clear separation between the headers and message body. This separation becomes most useful for accessing email from different clients. Which means that you can choose not to download that 500MB email, or download it only after you've read the smaller emails.
An ego helps you be ok with declining those Outlook meeting requests. They are called "requests" for a reason.
Availability tracking is a GOOD thing, but only if the people using the system are adults. Freaking out over meeting requests is not really the best way to handle it. Block out essential time, feel free to decline or propose a new time, and deal with the fact that some of the time you'll have to go to a meeting you don't want to.
If the problem is that your boss has no respect for your schedule or hours, well, I'd say that's a much bigger problem than Outlook.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Email works great, except when it doesn't.
The problem is that email doesn't work so well. Not for what a lot of people use it for, anyway, which is organizing large projects. I'm sure we've all seen situations where the design document database is the product manager's inbox. This is Bad, and it's what collaboration software is designed to solve.
Even with the wiki tool I recently joined. I'm not the admin and therefore I can't see everything even though I should. The "owner" doesn't think I should have total access. Other users retaliated by making their own versions of the wiki, now we have like 5 for the same project with people belonging to some and not others. I told them to contact me via e-mail. I don't have time to look at all the other ones and that is just one project.
I think the best collaberation tool that I use is Lotus Notes. For those that have used Notes, they know how bad even that sucks. Propriatary database, lots of steps, links... prone to errors. It is just marginally better than wiki, or perhaps wiki is better. Of course another problem is crap that is put in by the users. I wish there was a way to say for example anything (idiot) user X says, mod it down to zero. Whoever is running the project - mod them up. Top ideas get moved into a comprehensive list. People also have to learn how to ask the right question or ask questions so they are not biased. For example - "Should we buy Dell desktops." compared with "Which desktop systems should we buy." Then list potential desktop systems and the relevent data. Try to find lowest price, most features, best repair record. If that is Dell then good for them. Otherwise consider the best machine. Make decisions based on facts and not BS. Of course you may end up having to buy - Dell for example because the owner says so. Sometimes managers want people to think they have input into a decision even though they don't.
I think it is a good idea. However stick it back in, it isn't done yet. We need a better UI.
Groupware bad.
Users good.
Speak truth to power.
it's not political.
j
Many mailservers already use http for webmail. Enabling the protocol for a mailserver without webmail available (just for downloads) wouldn't be terribly difficult. Domain would be same as mailserver since it's a mailserver function.
I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
I think you got it exactly right. Email is a very mature mode of communications. It's been de-facto standardized: if I sit down in front of the Compose window of an Outlook system, even though I'm used to using Lotus Notes, I'm going to be able to figure it out.
When you get down to it, I'd argue that most email programs share about 90% of their functionality; product differentiation is all about that last 5%. The differences between programs are mostly in sorting and managing messages, filtering, creating automatic follow-ups and the like. They're not really even differences in the actual email part of the program, mostly. (Perhaps Exchange is a bit different.) "Collaboration" programs, on the other hand, can be totally different from each other. They may not even use the same basic UI metaphors. Some want to be 'online conference rooms,' others want to be 'electronic whiteboards.'
There's bound to be confusion about any new communications medium when the field of options is this fragmented. It probably won't be until the options become somewhat standardized and similar that people will begin to decide it's worth learning about, and thus getting comfortable with.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Personally, I think the best solution is for the outbound email servers (SMTP) to identify and remove large attachments, replacing them with a URL to obtain the file via http(s).
That is a really smart idea. A sufficiently long random token would mean people couldn't fish for attachments, so security is no worse. The rise of WebDAV makes it easy to set up a relationship between your mail server and your web server.
I think the only drawback is that it shifts storage burden from recipient to sender. You'd probably have to put in an expiration policy notice in with the replacement link. Or perhaps mail servers could implement this for inbound email as well, so that you don't have to wait for everybody else to get a clue about big attachments.
"I think that would be a very good solution - it doesn't require any modifications to client software, it's transparent to the users and it's many times more efficient. The only difficult variable would be how long you keep the attachment available on the web server."
Good point, and that could vary depending on the org's needs.
- Simple solution is a default. Configurable by the sysadmin, and noted in the email. Not perfect, but simple. If someone does not want to lose it, they can make the effort to download it and save it locally.
- Complex solution is a default, but the server sends the sender and email notifying them of the fact the attachment was stripped, giving them a URL to go in and change the "time to live" setting for that file. If it is something very short-lived (a "draft" version of a doc for example), you might actually lower the default. If it is something that might have a longer useful life, then allow them to extend it (with some max). 99% would probably keep the default (say 90 days or so).
The only athletic sport I ever mastered was backgammon - Douglas William Jerrold
These collaboration tools are actually trying to capture and institutionalize the dysfunctional activities of large groups and companies who love to layer on useless group activities instead of assigning someone to do something. Communication is critical and email automates it so it's a valuable too. So-called collaboration tools are posing as tools to automate something that wastes more time than produces results. Using URI pointers and related stuff makes email simple and efficient even when it deals with large and complex objects.
over collaboration software is the fact that the recipient retains some level of control over their own time management.
I know that in a perfect world with perfect co-workers collaborative tools would help, but that's not the world most people live in.
It's amazing how many people out there are perfectly happy to spend their day filling other people's schedules, just because their own is empty. I thankfully work for a firm that bills hourly for employee time, so unnecessary meetings are avoided because there's just too much real work to do. But I have worked in several other firms where a boss or even an admin assistant's need to feel control encouraged them to regularly schedule meetings, events, etc. ad nauseum just to make sure that everyone remembered that they had the power to take hours away from your life if they wanted to. It has been my experience that when these same people get hold of collaboration software, they become even more efficient at disrupting your day. I don't ever again want to work where these people's NAGGING ABOUT MEETINGS and DISRESPECT FOR MY TIME MANAGEMENT has been AUTOMATED for them.
With e-mail, you preserve the necessity to request someone's time rather than pre-emptively assigning it for them. This little bit of politeness makes a huge difference in how difficult it is to throttle certain coworkers.
The problem is that it has become too easy to track people and schedule them into meetings.Yep. And before email + calendaring/scheduling software, the difficulty in getting the people to the meeting meant that only very important people could call a meeting or the meeting was very important to everyone in attendance.
Now, all it takes is someone with a desire for a meeting who has an extra minute to automatically search everyone's calendar and, with no social interaction what-so-ever, lock them into a meeting.
In most office places people treat information as power. Since information is power people can share it with whom ever they want, or perceive will help them from benifiting from the sharing. Collaboration systems without cliques allow everyone to see your powerful information. People also like to hoard, email allows them to hoard. If you are one of the few receipiants of a particular piece of email, you have something that others don't. Email feeds the need to hoard and to use information as power. The idea of a Wiki scares the shit out of most people.
I guess it's like walking around naked, society has taught us not to do that.
Every single collaboration tool I've seen is developed with the same model. "We think this is what you will want" I've yet to see one that is developed by asking "What do you need." and until developers and Market experts get their heads in a place where they don't fear the customer, it will continue to be crap that inhibits work instead of adds to it. BTW one collaberative tool is growing in popularity. IM.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Maybe the big brains at the IEEE should come out with an RFP "e-parcel" protocol that uses an even THICKER envelop to send them pesky larger email messages.
This way the integrity of the message is protected from the evil onslaught of IT managers, routers, switches and firewalls TEARING away at the packet.
The Internet started with plain old IP and then some idiots started using this "TCP" thing..
Adding layers = what the internet is all about!
You can't guarantee delivery. You couldn't use it for legal notices. Today FAX is usually accepted in court, but not e-mail [unless copies from source and destination computers are available].
>Block out essential time, feel free to decline or propose a new time, and deal with the fact that some of the time you'll have to go to a meeting you don't want to.
You hit the nail on the head.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Asynchronous
Our organisation did not know how to work with this new medium. Email could only be recieved on one single computer.The it-supervisor had to print it out confidentially, drop it into an envelope, and write the name of the sender and recipient on it, and seal it. Then it was brought to the mail desk to have it registered in the mail register, as any regular paper mail. The envelop was stamped with the current date and time, and put in a distribution folder. An office messenger then delivered the folders to recieving departments, who then for each mail recieved entered a time and signature in the mail register. Any mail leaving the organisation also had to pass through the mail register. Since outgoing envelopes were sealed, we did not send emails.Things have changed since then :-)
Our first colaboration system was installed in 2003. Our organisation does not yet know how to work effectively with this system :-(
First of all, he doesn't differentiate between the things that are good about email and not about (say) his product or (say) Lotus Domino. Second he misses a bunch of things.
Quotations below are from TFA.
"Email is Easy To Understand"
So should a collaboration system be. The fact that his is cluttered, doesn't render correctly in anything other than IE, looks too much like Outlook while not behaving like Outlook is probably a barrier to adoption.
"Email is Universal"
So is "the web". If people perceive your web-based app as being "the web" then there's no barrier to adoption. If they perceive it as being an application they need to learn, bye bye. This is a big problem with Web 2.0 advocates -- they need to lose "application envy" and build applications whose behavior is as transparent as using the web. If it were easy, anyone could do it.
"Email is Accessible from Anywhere"
Well kind of. Email doesn't work superbly well offline; the web doesn't work at all offline. Web-based email (gmail, anyway) has gotten so good that for me its benefits (nearly always accessible) outweigh its downsides (not available offline). If your collaboration tool doesn't offer enough benefits to outweigh total unavailability offline (or somehow address this issue without becoming too complex) you lose.
"Email Can Be Personalized"
So can anything. So what? There's no skin you can put on FireFox that makes it look as good as random OS X dialog box.
"Email is Manageable/Configurable"
Again, duh. So is everything. Indeed, configuration and personalization are generally not as important as not sucking.
"Email is Searchable"
Kind of. Searching your email in Outlook/Exchange sucks canine gonads. Searching email in OS X prior to 10.4 sucked nearly as badly. Searching gmail is getting close to good. Again, why can't this be a feature of ANY system?
"Email is In Your Face"
Actually here he completely misses the point. He refers to email as being disruptive "like instant messaging" but effective. NO. WRONG.
Email is necessary. You need email, like you need mail. You can't just ignore your mailbox, because the law says that, for example, sending you a letter saying that if you don't pay a bill you will go to jail constitutes sufficient notice of that fact. Since email is taking over the role of mail (e.g. an offer of employment sent by email is basically just as binding as a physical letter) you need email. It doesn't matter HOW GOOD your product is, it won't stop folks checking their email. Similarly, if someone stops checking their project tool, chances are they won't stop checking their email unless they've basically stopped participating in life, in which case you weren't going to contact them anyway.
"Email Just Works"
No it doesn't. But because it's necessary (see above) folks will damn well get it working.
Collaboration is when people work on the same project. Email allows people to work on the same project from lots of different places, using whatever software they choose that can send email. The telephone is much the same.
Computer-based collaboration solutions are a supposed step up, providing nice rich environments, and theoretically removing some of the burden on other systems. However, they don't come ready-to-roll. They come as a box of tools, each of which needs configuring. Now, because users do not know what this stuff is supposed to do, or even that it exists, IT departments and/or vendors who get appointed to deploy the stuff don't get much in the way of a workable list of requirements.
Before long, you either have a dog's dinner or a white elephant. As exemplified by a solution like Lotus Notes which often ends up being used exclusively as an email client, even though email isn't its strong point.
That said, there are lots examples of successful collaborative solutions. Slashdot is collaborative, flickr is collaborative, Wikipedia is collaborative, CVS is collaborative. They are all very successful. So, I don't think it's the concept, the software or the learning curve that makes for failure. It's not the proprietaryness of them either. In fact I have seen a commercial solution work well - but it did need literally months of training and internal marketing, and was developed with extensive input from representatives from each working group and department.
My view is that failure is made simply because these solutions are imposed on a workforces that didn't ask for them by managements that, although they may know how the software works, have no good idea of how their employees work, and not much interest in finding out.
each file would be assigned a username consisting of the MD5 checksum of the file, and a password either a random number or the file MD5 encryped by some secret key, these would be added to the link in the email making unauthorized access to the file just short of exactly as likely as unauthorized access to the email.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I think the keys are that it's quick, asynchronous and signals the recipient. You can always fire off an email at a whim without regard for whether the addressee is available but take my time writing if I wish. In addition, you don't have to respond unless you want to. You don't even need to check it unless you want to but, if you do, you know immediately what's new. Everything else I've seen falls short somewhere.
...and the KISS principle is amongst the most useful, and least understood. Some developers seem to think that, if they can just make their software capable of doing anything anyone would ever want to do, that this translates into simplicity.
You can not reach simplicty through complexity. It's one of those concepts that's so plug stupid, people discard it without even thinking about all the overly-complicated things they hate in life. Embracing it is a key to making a highly accessible system, with broad appeal.
My signature may seem to contradict this, but I believe both principles stand, and the truly perfect, pure system we all want falls in between.
Shaw's Principle: Build a system even a fool could use, and only a fool would want to use it.
It's because it's Strongbad's preferred method of communication!
As a CS Major, I have to work on at least one group-oriented coding project a semester. As a girl, I carry my cell phone at almost all times. The cell phone is a ubqiuitous tool in completing the projects.
Here's how my projects tend to go in terms of use of the following media:
Anything that tries to do what these four things already do and/or combine any of the following will not work. Period. They're separate because they function better separate, and texting counts as IM'ing in my book.
Besides, cell phones are much easier to keep up with than laptops.
The reason colaboration software fails is the weakest link. It only takes one person on the team, or one asshole manager to not use the colaboration software, and its worthless and everyone reverts back to email. I've been through it we deploy a great system, everyone starts using it. One person refuses to use or learn the system starts emailing everyone. There information is suddenly no longer in the system. Everyone else gets tired of using the colab system and then emailing the information to the one person not using it. It becomes double entry everyone starts thinking its stupid and in less that 2 weeks its out the door and everyone is using email.
Most don't have access to network storage, web space or other sane ways of transfering files. Most of those that do, don't know how or even know that they do have access. So they end up trying to abuse e-mail with binary attachments instead or resorting to sneakernet for file transfer. Shops running MS in place of some real server OS actually capable of providing networked storage usually are the worst off, because even if networked storage is there on paper, in practice it doesn't work. For it to work the management has to have the foresight to stick with Netware or move to Samba or AFS or something else without a high-pressure sales team.
Binary e-mail attachments should be filtered out at the server level. There's just no excuse for them and their removal would go a long way in getting rid of most Microsoft worms and viruses. I guess the euphamistic term would be 'computer' malware, not Microsoft worms and viruses.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Email is more appealing because it is asynchronous and does not apply double standards between genuine advertizements and spam...
God and religion are distinct
Networked storage is accessed via ----> the network! If you can send them a mail you could use the file sever instead faster and more accurately, just drag from one folder to another and drop.
If you have branches in 5 countries, they're going to have local servers anyway. Just set up an extra folder/dropbox/hierarchy for each branch. Each branch can reach the other when it needs to and otherwise keeps stuff local. Usually print sharing is part of the deal: no more inter-branch faxes, just print to the other department's printer or put the document in their drop box and let them print it themselves. The only problems occur if you are trying to use a server running MS Windows as the file server. That task has to be handled by something professional grade like Samba, Netware or AFS.
I've set up networked storage for many people and more than a handful of units. I've also had to show many people how to use their already installed, full power networked storage which even had it's own icon or folder on their desktop. The only obstacles I can think of from the user perspective are that it must be too easy. People somehow feel they are doing more work if it's harder than just dropping a file into a folder. Or it could be the old metaphor that the whole world's a nail if all you have is a hammer. Maybe the mail client is the only tool that they're familiar with.
Setting up networked storage with an organized and relevant hierarchy of user and group folders complete with public folders and dropboxes will save your company big time. I've done it before. If you're not already doing it here's how:
Spend a little time each day to find out what tasks involve document sharing and with whom. Identify the early adopters. Set up what you think will work and try to use it your self for a week and match it with your ongoing information gathering. Based on that ask theoretical questions to the early adopters and adjust your model. Have the early adopters try a limited pilot along side whatever they're doing now. Adjust your model, lather, rinse, repeat. When the pilot is looking good, then try a larger pilot in one of the early adopters' departments parallel to whatever they're currently doing. Adjust your model, lather, rinse, repeat. Then when it looks good, work out a schedule with the other departments for them to try it. Once they're comfortable, have them phase out use of the old method. After a few months, you could even disable the old method.
If you need ideas for a basic structure, each person, project and department gets its own home folder. Each home folder gets a dropbox (auth users can insert but not read or anything else), a public folder (auth users can read but nothing else) a shared folder (to which they can authorize others to read, writer, etc.) and every thing else is private.
Assign read, write, edit, and other privileges to groups not individuals. An individual gets privileges through his group (which only he is the member). That makes maintenance easier and helps you be able to test out new configurations or transfer responsibilities as people change roles.
That sounds like a lot, but it's not though some techs may not like the social hacking needed to find out how people are really working (not just how they say they are). And it will either save work, increase productivity or both.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
No, most often there is absolutely no common networking access between these people, and e-mail is the only connecting thing, as they all have only heavily firewalled access to the outside.
The workgroup that needs to share files can often involve people in different companies - your customers; vendors of services; (advertising companies in particular) parent company; outsourced activities; wholly-owned subsidiaries; consultants; etc), so that naturally means no common hardware servers; no common user authentification; no common software platforms; no common 'higherups' that would push for unification; no common security people that would approve exceptions.
Even in a single medium sized (~300 people and multiple sites) company such situations might occur. In any large company, it's pretty much unavoidable. I have workad at places where getting a possibility of network access from IP address A to IP adress B on port X a process that involves IT, security, and management of different companies and can take from two weeks to two months.
The shared folder system that you describe is natural, works well, and is usually implemented in that or very similar way in most places - for the local users of some branch. But there usually aren't things common for everyone - the network speeds make it impractical, as accessing the server of another branch is much, much slower, so every location tends to have it's own file storage.
Also, if the message takes five minutes to go through the network, then e-mail doesn't make the user wait for this - it is processed automatically. Using Excel or whatever on a remote, slow-speed shared folder does make the user wait for these files - so working on these folders is less user-friendly.
E-mail seems to be the only collaboration tool that works in a heterogenous environment with firewalls in-between and slow connection speeds.