Slashdot Mirror
Why Email is a Bad Collaboration Tool
An anonymous reader writes "Isaac Garcia follows up his popular "The Good in Email" article with "The Bad in Email or (Why Steve Ballmer is the CTO of Microsoft)":
"In spite of email's universal success (as a collaboration tool), and in spite of its many good traits, email contains deep, inherent flaws that force users and markets to seek alternatives to collaborating via email."
Wait a few minutes
Yeah, I think I'd pretty much wait for you in the parking lot after work. And I wouldn't be there to give you a hug, ifyaknowwhatimean.
Oh, by the way, my boss has it somehow set to default that it's urgent and he needs a response once I've read it. Same with his secretary. Urge to kill rising
My work here is dung.
An intelligent user of email considers whether sending an email is appropriate for the communication at hand. That's the way it is with so many tools--they're often misused, but that doesn't mean they don't still have their proper place.
The summary states the title of the article as: "The Bad in Email or (Why Steve Ballmer is the CTO of Microsoft)"
Two problems with that:
Problem #2 is especially difficult to understand, as the article itself correctly identifies Ray Ozzie as Microsoft's CTO.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Steve Ballmer != CTO
Dear OSS community,
please come up with a better email! As a business user I need something that has guaranteed, secure delivery. I don't care how it is done, but that's what I need. If you don't do it, eventually somebody else will - probably Microsoft - and then you'll complain about their implementation and be playing catchup.
Thanks!
P.S. Yes, I know it's difficult.
What I mean by silo'ed is that email traps information into personalized, unsharable, unsearchable vacuums where no one else can access it - the Email Inbox. Think of your Email Inbox as a heavily fortified walled garden. Not mentioning the difficulties many have accessing their Email Inbox outside the corporate firewall, the Email Inbox contains a hodgepodge of business, personal and private information that most people do not want to share with others.
Unfortunately, the Walled Gardens of our Email Inboxes are deceivingly warm and cozy. This feigned-comfort of safety whispers into our ears like a wily devil to, "Just email the document to me" or "Just email that document to yourself" with the false-belief that it will remain safe, secure and locked away. But that is just it......its locked away so that NO ONE ELSE CAN ACCESS IT. This is counter-culture to team collaboration.
And how many times have you sent out a document for comment and gotten back 30 different versions with markups, which you then have to reintegrate into one document and somehow handle inconsistencies and overlap? Then of course you need the document, but don't have a copy where you're at, so you retrieve one from an email and use that, but it's an old version, so you have to recreate revisions. And then someone always emails you their revisions late, after you think you're all done (usually it's your boss, so it's not like you can just leave them out).
If nothing else, you need a document collaboration tool, to avoid this nightmare of multiple files, and email is not it.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I believe the problem with Email is usually only 10% of what you are trying to communicate is actually understood.
:-)
Sort of like posting on slashdot.....
RTFG - Read The F#$%ing Google!
From the article:
The single worst trait of email is that it's silo'ed.
Then he says:
For many folks, the Email Inbox contains their most intimate secrets all mashed together into a single location: business correspondences, contracts, proposals, reminders, tasks, love letters, indiscreet online purchases, dirty jokes, pictures of your spouse (and kids), time-wasting games, inappropriate messages from co-workers and friends and lets not forget spam.
To me it seems like the perfect argument for why email should be silo'ed, and that it's one of the reasons why it is still so popular. I completely agree with his comment that there is a wealth of information hidden within emails that others could/would find useful. However, there obviously is even more that most would find useless or that the inbox owner wouldn't want visible. To me email represents the best, if flawed compromise. If the inbox owner wants to, they can redistribute their emails to a wider audience. This can be done by forwarding, or in Outlook, simply dragging the email to a public folder. I think the alternative approach, assume that everything is public and force the user (either sender or receiver) to selectively "hide" or "target" emails falls too far on the "other side" for most companies.
In development over the last 5 years I think the most useful tools are IM (or IRC) and Wiki. Email can be used to setup a time to meet/work on things, from there constant talk back/forth via IM is perfect. Hashing out overall ideas via the Wiki is perfect for before and after, and allows for ones ideas to get fully out there, then edited by others during critque.
This has been true for me working on OSS at night with a partner in Qubec as well as working in the same office with a developer two aisles away.
fak3r.com
"The Bad in Email or (Why Steve Ballmer is the CTO of Microsoft)"
:)
Except the article says :
Therefore, we'd like to present The Bad In Email, or Why Ray Ozzie is the CTO of Microsoft.
There's a bug somewhere... maybe bad RAM, or buggy software, maybe between the chair and keyboard (if your chair hasn't been thrown away by Steve, that is)
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
A fairly insightful article, but it misses a couple of points:
It's difficult (if not impossible) for the average user to discern who an e-mail is actually from. Most people have no idea about message headers or IP addresses. It is trivial to send e-mail spoofing the address, and have 95% of people unquestioningly believe it's from the address you specify. This is one of the biggest and easiest to exploit weaknesses in e-mail.
E-mail is incredibly easy to ignore. Really, really, really easy. Claiming you didn't receive an e-mail is a get-out to any number of problems in collaborative projects, mostly because it's so common - it's fairly easy for an e-mailto not get to its recipient, be it an over zealous spam-filtering policy, a misconfigured mail server somewhere along the line or a lack of space on a company intranet (combined with badly configured mail servers which are relatively common).
I have that turned off. You will never know :) And no one can even read my calendar, let alone insert ( except the exchange admin of course, which i am one )
Oh, and if you tag it as important. i ignore it that much faster.
Yes i know you were joking.. however i wasnt...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Where's the problem, again?
"If you are using POP or IMAP, you need to know that they both require you to send unencrypted authentication (username/password)."
Ah, not necessarily. Especially in the IMAP world, see IMAP over SSL.
[insert story about linux box and IMAP/SSL/MUTT]
Here's the real problem: You tried to scare your audience with concepts that your target audience doesn't understand. You can't scare ignorant people, see low limit Texas Hold'em.
Anything is possible given time and money.
Some great quotes :
Email is NOT Secure (Part 1)
[...]
(Anyone using cryptographic e-mail is in the minority and the exception to the rule.)
Anyone needing secure e-mail is in the minority and the exception to the rule.
there is no way to 'retract' your email.
And how are you retracting your mail ?
Email is Prone to Viruses
There is no need to elaborate here.
You should make an effort. I do not understand.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
MS has a product that will completely solve all these problems....
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
There is a way to use e-mail as such a tool, which was the preferred method used by the Spanish Al-Queda cell:
1. Open e-mail account (on your own web mail server, preferably) and publish username/password to members of cell/department/workgroup.
2. Write e-mail detailing plan and save as "draft."
3. After connecting by SSL, other co-workers/conspirators view and edit draft or attach comments for all to browse and update.
4. If server is owned by group, files are as secure as the passwords and OS. If a public/commercial server is used, drafts and connection IPs may be discovered and will persist on backups and logs.
Part of this article drives me nuts, and I see the same crap in /. comments all the time:
2. The data is often 'NSFW' (Not Safe For Work).
Why did he use the acronym if he defines it directly after use. The only reason he should do this is if he used 'NSFW' elsewhere in the article, which he does not. The writer should decide whether he feels this acronym is recognizable enough to use without a definition. If it is then use it, otherwise don't!
Fixed:
2. The data is often not safe for work.
nothing
E-mail will have been dead for close to a decade in 3 years. Yes, we all still use it. Yes, it is a primary form of communications for anything over 30 miles. And yes, the horse is dead but we'll still beat it.
I stopped using e-mail as my primary form of communications almost 7 years ago (about the time I started using SMS en masse, combined with instant messaging when available). For me, e-mail is no different than TV, radio and telephone -- all technologies that should have been replaced eons ago but for whatever reason have been held back from evolving.
I agree that e-mail is a terrible collaboration tool, but considering when it was "invented" and how few real iterations of change we've seen with in, I don't expect it to ever blossom into a truly useful tool for productivity. I would have to guess that while e-mail is more efficient than a fax or a letter, it is not a telephone replacement, nor is it a replacement for even a simple post-it note. The only collaboration-friendly element of e-mail is the idea that it leaves a log or an audit trail of exchanges, but it is missing all the other important elements for group-think or idea creation.
I believe the future of connecting everyone within a group to one another plus incorporating outside groups into the "conversation" will likely come out of a different technology than e-mail. I see great possibilities in RSS and XML as a platform for long term collaboration, and the Wiki idea is a step in the right direction. Combine both with a tagging feature and incorporate more than just text, and you have a mess of protocols that together can really make a difference for building and sharing ideas. Maybe a little slashdot-style user-modifiable open-view moderation, too. Before any protocol or format can be created that really is the end-all solution, we need the underlying platform to be finalized. We need the Net available all the time, everywhere, at low cost (commodity-priced) and at high speed. I believe that the EDGE/3G networks are getting us closer (I am typing over an EDGE-connected T-Mobile link now), but we're not there yet. When information can be accessed immediately, when notifications can become part of the data stream, and when the ability stream your thought into a final product with anyone else, I think we'll see that product that many of us are waiting for without knowing it.
I've given a lot of thought to collaboration tools of the future, and I know exactly what I want. I just know that even if I implemented it today, most of my workers, friends, co-writers and readers would not be able to mesh with the Wiki-XML-SMS-Slashdot-tagging tree with the speed that I would think is necessary to make that collaboration better than a simple whiteboard and a boardroom.
Another few months, maybe. A few years, for sure.
Overzealous spam filters. I've recently tried to send PDF and JPG files to some people, and failed. The recipients' ISP's filters blackholed either the attachments or the entire message. Nuts! .exe. Being able to tell Outlook "yes, I know what's at stake, show me the damn attachment anyway" would help.
Another intended recipient has a local spam filter that somehow checks the messages while still on the POP server. This takes bloody ages, causing the transfer to time out. Lather, rinse, repeat. As a result, he has to use a webmail client to receive large messages.
And then there's Outlook's inability to receive executables. Yes, I know viruses blah blah blah, but there are times when I've a legitimate reason to send someone an
1. "If you are using SMTP (the universal pipe, remember?), you need to know that it doesn't encrypt data/messages. If you are using POP or IMAP, you need to know that they both require you to send unencrypted authentication (username/password)."
None of these is true. Encrypted SMTP, POP and IMAP all exist and we've been using encrypted POP/IMAP where I work for over two years now.
2. In the discussion of encrypted e-mail, he jumps straight into certificates with no acknowledgement or apparently even clue that PGP/etc. exist and are a lot simpler to set up and use (even in Outlook, or even manually if you have to).
3. "Eudora Security Flashback: I still don't know what the hell Kerberos is and what it has to do with a dog much less my email?"
Considering that this guy is, judging from the content of his post, very Microsoft-centered, for him to not know what Kerberos is suggests he is not even close to any kind of expertise in the field.
4. "Most companies spend a fortune locking down their IT infrastructure. This results in either Total Lockdown, also known as Paralysis whereby no one can do anything without a password, passkey, keycard, signature and sign-in sheet; or in No Lockdown, also known as Free-Love-Utopia whereby everyone is equal because everyone is an Administrator."
Um... no? He says "This results" as though these alternatives are the only two possible. This is probably just sloppy writing, but it still sticks out at me.
5. "If everyone used Outlook (70% of Central Desktop users use Outlook), then the ability to assign priority to each message would actually work. But we don't live in a Microsoft world (in spite of what many of you might think) and instead, we usually measure and weigh the importance of an email message by the number of people included in the carbon copy. This is highly subjective and fails to address the need to order and sort messages and task by importance."
I know from personal experience that Eudora among others had the capability to set and recognize a Priority or read-receipt header as long as 10 years ago. Priority fell out of favor because of abuse by spammers, but it does exist. And that was valid for any message sent to or from anyone on the Internet. Can we trust Outlook's read-receipt and priority flags to be as portable?
6. "Its still challenging for multiple people to share business email accounts (i.e. support, bugs and sales messages). IMAP sort of works, but presents its fair-share of limitations."
Such as? How could IMAP be better? Given the inherent needs and limits of sharing what is essentially a file folder, I think IMAP is designed about as well as it can be. There could be improvements, but nothing I can think of that would make me go "wow! It's a whole different IMAP!"
7. "Email is Prone to Viruses - There is no need to elaborate here."
Yes there is, because (say it with me!) E-MAIL IS NOT PRONE TO VIRUSES. E-MAIL CLIENTS ARE.
There are some good points in this article, but you have to filter them out from the sophistry.
-- Old Man Kensey
I'm going to be starting on a spare-time open source project pretty soon and was wondering what people recommend for collaboration. The biggest project I worked on was the jboss portal server(previous version) and communication to developers(non-jboss employed at least) seemed to be mostly by email and forums. It was a little hard to know for sure if someone else was working on the same thing as me until a cvs commit. All the jboss guys I delt with were really helpful, but because of some of the reasons outlined in the article I kind of always wanted a better way...
Thankfully the new project I'll be working will have 2 main developers in the same city so we'll actually have some sit down sessions but so far almost everything is in email. What are good collaboration practices(the article mostly just said email sucks)? For software I'm currently investigating gforge with the wiki plugin. Does the slashdot community like wikis for collaboration between developers on software development projects or something else? Does all this really get solved when you have a dedicated project manager? Should your collaboration tool also be your project management tool? Any good project management tools(esp. ones that combine collaboration software). Thanks!
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
In fact, SMTP offers a number of secure alternatives, included TLS within an otherwise unencrypted pipe, or SMTP/SSL on port 463. POP and IMAP both support TLS for 110/143, as well as POP3S/IMAP4S over 995/993, and have not required plain-text login since the introduction of capabilities negotiation more than a decade ago -- both of them support a version of the AUTH verb. (To give you a sense of time, the relevant RFC's were published before Netscape developed SSL v1, back when sending creds over the wire in clear text was completely standard.)
The guy's trying to sell something, but it would help if he could sell things without lying about them.
Would be a perfect proof of email being a fine tool for collaboration. People have found innovative ways to *express* themselves _effectively_ using email. Most of the Linux kernel development happens over LKML and they haven't yet gone to find other effective ways of collaboration.
Kerberos is an authentication protocol; it only allows hosts on a network to reliably determine one another's identity. It can't (by itself) prevent snooping if the message, or to prevent alteration of a message in transit. The only thing(s) that could reliably prevent snooping would be message level encryption/signatures.
Most senders I've received E-mails from assume I received and read the mail within 5 minutes of their sending it. Scheduling a meeting for 20 min after sending the mail notification is rediculous, or sending it right at the end of the workday (or later) and assuming I'm so eager to read it I access my work E-mail from home. If its that important PHONE ME! Just because you sit all day at your desk with your E-mail open doesn't mean I do, two way communication is the only way to confirm a message is received.
Winston Churchill once said "Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." You could say the same thing about email as a collaboration tool -- it sucks, but for the average user it sucks less than every other option.
None of these objections are so large that they can't be overcome; many people use the tools above successfully. But for the average user, who accepts defaults and isn't interested in learning a new skill just to organize a meeting, they all have flaws that outweigh the flaws of e-mail.
I hate collaboration-by-email as much as the next guy, but until we can come up with something that is an order of magnitude better for the average user right out of the box, we shouldn't be surprised if they keep shooting e-mails around. (sigh)
Read my blog.
(Here Here!)
It doesn't have to be like this. My mother runs a counseling service and I installed gpg and a plugin for SquirrelMail - and now my mother, my father, and yes, my grandmother can easily send encrypted mail back and forth. And we have to, if we want to discuss clients over email and stay HIPAA compliant.
Sysadmins, install gpg on your servers, and let everyone set up a key pair! It's ridiculously easy these days to install basic cryptography into email now. Thunderbird even has great plugins.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Why is BCC so bad? Because someone else makes a unilateral decision to make you a *secret* recipient of an email. I never know if it's ok to acknowledge that I got to email or do I have to play dumb if one of the *real* recipients talks to me about it.
Always be polite.
http://subversion.tigris.org/
Other then DNS checks, or RBL lists...there is no effective way of providing proof that your mail server is who it is. Most sys admins and ISP's absolutely refuse to enforce these rules. So spam is a huge reason it's not good collaboration practice.
I filter mail for several large businesses, including my work place. When discussing a blocked mail marked for them...they make it sound like you are breaking into thier bank account and stealing revenue directly from their business. Get real people.
Email isn't a form of dependable communication in a business environment. It's only effective about 98% of the time. PICK UP THE PHONE AND CALL...Geez. Email is a great form of communication when you are enforcing the effectiveness of a phone call (meeting notes, etc.)
And there are several, was that people should have never been allowed to save a document in their perspective mailboxes. Any documents should have been automatically saved in some form of folder on a file server.
Ironically, Apple sends out emails tagged appropriately as Low Priority. I get my ADC emails in Outlook with the blue down arrow :-)
If you need collaboration use a web forum. If you need collaboaration on content creation use a wiki.
Mail is for personal exchanges and is very primitive.Instant messaging/IRC/webchat already
outdoes it by a wide margin.
Only sites that insist on registration
require email adresses for verification,
or mere formality.Email is a thing of the past along with usenet.It will eventually be superseded by something like webmail integrated into forum or chat(private messages on forums already exhibit similar features,though they are different and lack several features of email,adressing schemes being one of them ).
some future Metaforum with various integrated tools,will provide all services of the web(webpages(with separate format then threads),forum,p2p integration(a tracker),inter-forum mail(by a agrred upon scheme),web chat(a feature reduced,realtime text channell/thread),calendar,file database,and content management features(wiki,cvs,sql)).
It's a good thing I don't have any karma to speak of, because I'm sure I'm about to burn a bit, but...
"The only thing worse than one walled garden are many walled gardens."
Why do people do things like this? It's confusing. And it's not hard to get it right. Didn't the author read this out loud before publishing it to tens or hundreds of thousands of people? It's not tricky, guy. The subject is 'thing'. 'Thing' is singular. So your verb also needs to be singular (is). How do you fuck this up?
Unpleasantries.
I think the issue is mostly how people use email in collaboration situations, not the actual technology. This fact pretty much dooms other technologies to be no better; even people using the ideal collaboration software can (and will) sometimes send a personal email instead of using the tool.
The solution is to train people in using the tool. On the linux-kernel mailing list, the policy is that you cc the list on any reply to a message on a list, and cc all recipients. If you violate this rule, people complain. This means that the whole discussion is archived and publicly searchable. It also means that everybody participating in the discussion gets a copy addressed to them of each message, and doesn't have to try to find messages that are part of the discussion in the huge volume of mailing list traffic.
The whole point of the exercise is for thousands of people to edit a huge document (the kernel source) at the same time, and most of the changes go through email to the list, too. Here, the policy is to cc anyone who is likely interested (like the appropriate maintainer, if you want the change to actually stick).
Of course, this requires people to set up their email appropriately; you ideally want to get your direct copies of messages in your inbox and all of the mailing list mail filtered out. But anyone on linux-kernel pretty much has to have their email set up cleverly, because the traffic is too high to deal with directly (I think the non-spam on there is higher traffic than most people's spam before filtering).
About the only thing that would make it better would be if there was a URI scheme for message IDs, supported both by mail readers (which would take you to the message in that folder) and web browsers (which would take you to an online list archive you've chosen). Currently, it's a bit awkward to refer someone to an old message; what people do is use the URL for their favorite web archive, but that isn't convenient for responding by quoting portions of it, or if the recipient happens to hate the sender's favorite archive, or if recipients want to know if they've received it before.
Of course, they're also a lot of hidden stuff: source code is a whole lot easier to do concurrent modifications on than office documents, because of tools like diff and patch and the use of filesystem structure within the document, as well as the compiler's support in cross-referencing things. So the collaborative editing task is a whole lot easier than word processing, which is stuck in the early 70s.
Steve Ballmer is CTO of Microsoft because it' is Microsoft. Somebody's got to take responsibility of becoming flop of Windows Vista... ;)
-Seeing the problem is ½ of solution-
Email is and should be recoginized and used for what it is, "Electronic Mail". Not "URGENT NEEDS A REPLY INSTANTLY"... NO! I do not check my email every five minutes, once or twice per day.
If you need an instant reply, how about use something like "Instant Messaging", VOIP, a phone call, or come over in person?
I really hate people who expect email to be almost the same thing as instant messaging. Email is a lower priority messaging system, it should not be used for something that you need an instant reply to.
Most of the problems mentioned in the article are overcome by using "Reply to All" -- which is how e-mail collaboration has always worked in my experience. The only one I see it not solving are the security concerns, which can be overcome with authenticated SMTP and IMAP.
Saying email is broken is like saying your screwdriver is broken because it won't drive nails into wood. The real problem is most people are stupid, and don't know how to select the right tool for the job. Since you seem to advocate that the phone is better than email, I submit that you are one of those people.
Like many people on Slashdot, I work in a team of people. (Well, actually, I work in a couple different teams of people.) If I need to communicate with someone else, sometimes email is the right thing to do. Sometimes a phone call is the right thing to do. Sometimes it's best to walk down the hall and bang on their office door. I do some of each every single day.
The biggest problem with phone calls or face-to-face meetings is that you are taking up a significant chunk of the other person's time and not allowing them to pick when that time is. If I need somebody to up a software rev on a system, or I need them to review a spec, or look at and comment on some code, there is no reason to waste 5-10 minutes of their time communicating this vocally when they can get the same information in a few seconds reading an email.
The 2nd biggest problem with phone calls and face-to-face meetings is you can't have them if the other person isn't available. Maybe they went to lunch. Maybe they have another phone call. Maybe they don't wear deodorant. Email allows asynchronous, ageographical communication, and that's important.
Which brings us to the bane of my existence: Voicemail. Any organization that has email service should get rid of their voicemail service for internal communication. Voicemail takes longer to get, it takes longer to listen to, and doesn't do anything for you that email doesn't.
paintball
Do we really need an article to tell us that email is a poor collaboration tool?
No.
What's with all the useless articles on here these days. Makes me wanna just troll because I am so bored here otherwise.
Install COX in your backend today!
Slashdot is the best place to collaborate.
The server is always up.
Comments are never deleted.
Good ideas are moderated up.
And perfect strangers can contribute.
It's not for the NSA to use for collaboration, but it does save them time when others use Slashdot instead of email.
Oh You POS
My initial theory on the summary was that it was trying to suggest that Steve Ballmer was CEO in name but CTO in action, but I don't know why anyone would want to suggest that.
IMHO a simple improvement to email would be no more than twice a day delivery.
Let me guess. You have stock in fax machine manufacturer?
Group Email is Really Complicated
I guess that's why there is no such thing as an internet email list...
Things sent with "High Priority" are almost always sent by an admin and are almost always about some silly bureaucratic thing. Why anyone things corporate goobledegook is important is beyond my understanding. Some exampels:
-Everyone needs to take silly class to infuse us with some sort of "corporate culture".
-It could be abot quarterly meeting where they tell us how well the company is doing. These meeting are so filled with spin as to be uniformative.
The following things are sent with normal importance:
-Customer X is having failures with our product and will stop buying if we do not fix it.
-If we change Y in the manufacturing process we can easily improve yields by x% and save a few million dollars per year.
A modest proposal. Let e-mail readers vote on if the "important" emails are important. If they are not important, the first several readers can "mod them down".
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
OK!!!1! i HAVE MY HANDS UP11!!! JUST POINT THE GUN AWAY!!!
This may be off-topic, but when I started using email I was told that it was guaranteed to be delivered or returned in 7 days. And indeed, when I had large files to deliver to a client (10M!) I would have to first break them into 1M pieces, and then mail everything off, each piece in a separate email, and then wait. For example, Monday afternoon I would start sending, and usually by Thursday morning it would complete, but once I had one message rejected on Sunday, 6 days later. Now we tend to check our email several times a day, because the expectation in the business world is that email will be received within 1/2 a day (4 hours). But if you're on a coding binge you may only check your mail a few times in a week, and your boss is thinking that you didn't get the email because you didn't respond. In my opinion it is the response latency that most people experience when they say that email is broken or unreliable.
But back to my main reason for liking email: accountability. A number of decisions I make for the two departments I manage, I get guidance from my legal counsel so if anything goes wrong and I get asked by the executive team what happened and whether I did my due diligence, I can go back to my email trail and show them that I consulted legal, brought up certain issues with executives. My having this has covered my rear end time and time again. To the point where if I am being asked to make a decision on an issue, I want it in email so that everthing is laid out and if anything goes wrong, I am 100% covered.
IMHO a simple improvement to email would be no more than twice a day delivery.
It is better to set the urgency of delivery T measured in time units by specifying when do you expect to get an answer.
* If T exceeds threshold Th1, then e-mail is send at night.
* If T is below threshold Th2, then e-mail is sent immediately.
* If T is between these thresholds, it is sent in T/2 time units (not immediately).
Recipient should know the urgency.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
It talks about why email is bad and doesn't take into consideration the simple fact that email is good because it closely imitates reality. That is the reason for what he calls a 'walled garden'; email only puts in 0s and 1s the way people communicate.
While he has some valid points about such issues as email folders not being searchable, not being shared easily, not secure enough etc. his main argument seems to stay the same: the problem is that email makes us act in a bad, counter-productive way. My opinion is that this is where he is fundamentally wrong. It's all about that usability thingie, and usability is often about imitating what you would do in reality. Email is perhaps the most user-friendly service that Internet has, and thus is expected to be used by the people the way they would do similar things in reality.
And most people around us are not geeks; they don't think in terms of 'how online collaboration should work'. (Not even all geeks do, either.) They most often have a vague comprehension of the fact that data shared by everyone is much more valuable than data that somebody has in private. So until people actually feel the need for a better collaboration engine, until they understand why it's better and how it makes them, their groups and companies more efficient at their tasks, email will stay the information medium of choice.
I'm somewhat skeptical myself about the 40yos and 50yos being able to learn the new ways of handling information; it seems to me that at least a decade should pass before people en masse actually realize what email can and what email cannot do and move on to better collaboration tools, such as forums/wikis/whatnot. Until then, there's only so much we can do: work on the Web 2.0 and patiently wait until somebody puts the new toys to serious use and hopefully proves their efficiency. From that point on, as money starts talking, things get moving...
Myself, with my projects I make heavy use of both the intranet forums and the IRC. I don't put much trust in IMs because they suffers from pretty much the same problems as e-mail does. However, only the young and open-minded are feeling themselves comfortable in this environment; even 30yos often have problems communicating online and there is almost no hope for those on the wrong side of 40 to adapt. Oh well.
I think this article misses the point of email entirely. Email is good for sending a message from one place to another. I don't think the originators of email saw it as a document management tool, a revision manager or any of the other hundred things people try to jam into it. It's amazing what people've been able to do with such a simple set of protocols, but it's kind of like complaining that your car doesn't make a good hot dog stand. Sure, you can sell hotdogs from it, and you can put buns in the glove compartment or paint it cool colors or advertise on it, but at the end of the day, it's a thing that gets you from point a to b.
Blaming Microsoft because they've added things to make it possible to collaborate badly is just silly. They've just added a pink bun warmer to a honda civic. Extraneous and barely functional? Sure. Their fault this doesn't make it the perfect hot dog stand? Not really.
I'm not sure who sounds dumber, the guy who wrote the Imelda Marcos reference in TFA or the guy who criticized him and used the phrase, "weakest link."
But it can be. I work for a company that develops a collaboration tool (amongs other stuff), and it uses a feature of Outlook that is sending an attachment by saving it into a SharePoint workspace (SharePoint is Microsoft's collaboration tool, they expect it to be a strong selling point of Office 2003 and beyond), that way every time someone opens it it's opened from the central workspace and edits are seen by everyone.
The collaboration tool we sell adds e-mail search and catalogation too.
So e-mail can potentially be adapted into a collaboration tool - I guess there must be an open source version of what I described hopefully.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Oddly enough this anology applies to carpentry, screwdrivers are terrible at pounding in nails, therefore they have no use in the construction industry.
-anon
The summary completely skimped on the best part of the article. The author cited a link when he mentioned how emails contain time wasting games!
I've just finished a university assignment with a classmate. We worked on http://www.jot.com/ where you can get a wiki. It was far easier than having emails flying between us, and easier than always trying to figure out which file was the latest. Instead, the latest work was on a private webpage, and I could see what she'd done since I last looked at it.
I used to do similar things, but then we got a corporate instant messenging system, and I think it's a much better solution for the problem you're describing.
I only very rarely use the system to actually send messages to anyone, but we all use it constantly to see who's around and available. (You can set it to available, away, or "don't bother me", which is a nice addition to the standard available/away. In the third case it suppresses all incoming messages.)
I don't find it intrusive, and it keeps people from dropping by my cube when I'm on the phone or otherwise occupied, assuming I've remembered to change my indicator appropriately.
Frankly I think you could really just make a buddy list program without the instant messaging features and retain about 90 percent of the usefulness, at least in my situation (everyone in the same physical office, mostly).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Any organization that has email service should get rid of their voicemail service for internal communication. Voicemail takes longer to get, it takes longer to listen to, and doesn't do anything for you that email doesn't.
Thank you and Amen. I agree; the only thing that saves me from really, really hating voicemail (more than I have, since the advent of email), is that we now have a VM-to-email system that sends me voicemail messages as email attachments. It still requires me to waste my time listening to someone stammer away on the phone when I could have skimmed their message in a few seconds on my screen in text form, but it beats having to pick up the phone and spend several minutes navigating through the prompts to retrieve my messages.
I understand there are some valid reasons for still having voicemail (people can send you one from anywhere, etc.) but they're rapidly dwindling as the number of places you can send email from grows.
I guess the solution is not to eliminate it completely just yet, but really to impress upon people that it's a nonpreferred method of communication, and should only be used when absolutely necessary.
Personally, part of my voicemail message is a warning that I don't check the system very often and that email is my preferred method of communication for anything sensitive.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
There's another thing about voice communication... it is HORRIBLE for sending certain types of information. URLs come to mind.
My boss is eager to get this piece of crap. Once we do we will be stuck using Outlook to organize things forever. Thus, the hunt is in earnest for affordable collaboration software to put on our server that is most compatible with our small business model before he finds the brochure.
Eventually he is going to sober up you know.
I wholeheartedly believe that online communities - be they social, technical, or business - are best served with tools that help build a sense of community. I believe there's a mostly forgotten but very effective tool - for several years now I've been part of a small MUD community. We're all technical people - some programmers, some not. None of us use the MUD for gameplaying, but rather for the social aspects. The ability to implement tools in code and give them physical characteristics through descriptions and interactive commands makes (eg. notes, loggers, rooms) adds another dimension to a space. Something that IRC, Instant Messaging, and certainly email lacks. The idea of being "present" with someone else in a room helps to develop personal relationships between participants. I've never had that with email or instant messaging, and have felt it with IRC, but it never lasts. Being able to exclude people from rooms, gag them, ignore them, or virtually stab them in the face and have them bleed for several hours are added benefits. The great "Web 2.0" collaboration doesn't quite meet expectations either, but it's aiming for something similar.
Larger communities even have types of Governments and democracy. A well managed MUD can cope with many thousands of people. Look at LambdaMOO.
A member of the MUD has used it as the primary point for collaborating development of a large software project, and it was quite effective. They didn't go so far as interfacing bug tracking (not that many developers & testers), but they could have.
I could see a MUD being used in a multinational organisation to enable easy group collaboration and bonding. When I was working for a multinational in Europe, the American guys didn't feel like part of my team, no matter how many conference calls we shared. I think being able to be part of their musings in a less formal atmosphere would've made a big difference.
The big problem with MUDs? If you're not careful, they can be time-wasters.
People communicate it's just a fact. by direct contact or by phone or by writing. If you think you cann't use email to colaborate then think again when the web was introduced java junk and asp fastfood came all over, money seeking people went to web services to write their own gadgets. For a great deal mimicing plain old conversations acka mail flow, the realy smart kids went back to their mail servers and wrote colaboration software on it. So at these environments you see a mail client open yeah.. only one app instead of having lot's of screens lots of databases lots of databases (out of sync) and all require a lot of IT overhead. The worse thing is just most people don't program against a mail server for workflow, because i think it requires a bit more knowledge, while creating a web page in a develpor environment is almost plain out of the box. Terrible because it result in hundred of company apps, which in large companies becomes a management nightmare.
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
"Where's the problem, again?"
Well, it might be when you have 5 business analysts. The scenario you use implies only one silo, which is fine but not universal.