More Vendors need to take this approach and use email for what it's good at which is communicating and moving notes and contextual information. Most of the collaboration that occurs is asynchronous anyway. Tasks and project updates are inbox friendly.
The trouble begins when the collaboration occurs around larger files or a large number of files. Even within a company, as opposed to outside, once a file gets into email it keeps getting forwarded rather than stored centrally. One problem is that a standard network file server does little to help users keep these files organized and therefore they would rather try and keep things organized in a way that makes sense to them in their inbox or on their local drive rather than conform to whatever structure is on the mapped network drive. It's also very difficult to search across the network.
Tools like Sharepoint, for regular documents, and Conisio, for engineering files and regular documents are not used internal to companies as much as they should be simply because only a small percentage of IT or business folks have been educated as to the benefits they offer. But they are gaining ground, and more and more companies are considering how they, and email, can work together to keep people organized and get their data under revision and process control.
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More Vendors need to take this approach and use email for what it's good at which is communicating and moving notes and contextual information. Most of the collaboration that occurs is asynchronous anyway. Tasks and project updates are inbox friendly. The trouble begins when the collaboration occurs around larger files or a large number of files. Even within a company, as opposed to outside, once a file gets into email it keeps getting forwarded rather than stored centrally. One problem is that a standard network file server does little to help users keep these files organized and therefore they would rather try and keep things organized in a way that makes sense to them in their inbox or on their local drive rather than conform to whatever structure is on the mapped network drive. It's also very difficult to search across the network. Tools like Sharepoint, for regular documents, and Conisio, for engineering files and regular documents are not used internal to companies as much as they should be simply because only a small percentage of IT or business folks have been educated as to the benefits they offer. But they are gaining ground, and more and more companies are considering how they, and email, can work together to keep people organized and get their data under revision and process control.