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."

Comments

The Real Problem

[Atomm]

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..... :-)

Re:Amen

[Frumious Wombat]

Which, in the end, is one of the problems; the Sender sets the importance, not the Reader.

IMHO a simple improvement to email would be no more than twice a day delivery. People would know the corporate email shows up at 6:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. Therefore, if that time has passed, you won't get a reply before the next email dump. This removes the pressure on the recipient, who knows he has at least 8 hours before anything has to be done with that email.

A side benefit is that there is only new email twice a day; when you arrive, and mid-afternoon. No more checking it every five minutes, no more boss yelling "did you get my email yet", no little dings/mailbox flags, etc, going off and distracting you from your job. Go a step farther, and let an intelligent agent apply your rules of priority to the message "has the word "superbowl video", so file it under "never"", rather than the sender's, and some of the issues are gone.

For colllabortion between more than 2-3 people, use a Wiki or Notes. Email should be for person-person, ephemeral, communication.

Re:Amen

[timster]

I've just disabled the "priority" column in Outlook, as all it tells me is that the email is from a certain person (who shall not be named) who seems to think that everything is urgent.

The disease I'd like to complain about today is the "read receipt". I can only imagine how much time people waste looking up whether I've read their message or not. You can turn that off, too, but some people really go crazy if they don't get their read receipts.

IM (or IRC) and Wiki

[fak3r]

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.

And a good Collaboration Tool is.......?

[ChaseTec]

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!

Re:Amen

[Fred_A]

The mail delivery time idea is quite clever.

In case anyone is interested, here is the setup we had in a little company (now long sold) I setup with friends a while back (I wasn't the one who came up with the idea) to manage the "info" mail account (standard email addresses were still used back then) :

• any incoming mail to info was dumped to our local news server in a private group we all read;
• replying to the newspost replied to the mail.

This would let you know who did what and it kept an archive in a platform independent format as well. It was used for other "global" addresses as well.

People could browse news in the same client (Netscape at the time) they used for email, which was convenient. We ran a mix of Linux, BSD, Windows and Irix.