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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?'"
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 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.
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.
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'
The author makes it sound like the world is full of vendors trying to sell collaboration solutions without email. Most office collaboration suites include email. It is just one more tool in the toolbox. The author should be asking himself 'who would build a collaboration suite without email?'
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.
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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Yes, and yes. And they also got up out of their cubicles and talked with other people. Email can be a waste of time too, spending lots of time crafting a perfect message when a quick phone call can accomplish the same thing.
ScienceSeeker.org
And that doesn't count the 13 pieces of spam that made it into my personal spam folder. I have no clue how much spam was blocked from my work account. All told I think the numbers are pretty reasonable, especially given the amount of email we used to sling around at my last position.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
The *real* problem is that there can be some text worth keeping in an email archive that came with that attachement. That's why lots of mail folders are cluttered with useless huge attachements.
With the current structure of email, thare's no simple way of discarding the attachment and keeping the mail body.
You can of course paste the said text to a new mail and send it to yourself but then you lose some metadata. Or you can edit the mail spool or whatever... I've always seen this as a design flaw of the current system.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
"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