

Stop the Madness Called Email - gengstrand
http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/future-of-work/5-reasons-why-you-should-stop-using-email-to-collaborate-34094

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quellhorst
It isn't the fault of email that people or not organized and use it wrong.

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gengstrand
No but, by the principle of Occam's Razor, given two or more solutions of
equal merit the simplest solution is always the best. What is simpler,
creating a sub folder for every document and moving email appropriately or
just clicking on the reply link to a page in your CMS?

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JimmyL
>> It is more likely to get lost over time through disaster. Unless you're in
the IT group, chances are you have a lot more control over the backup
retention policy and disaster recovery procedures of your CMS than your email
system. [...]

I don't buy this assumption. If you're in a company where the points of this
article are an issue, in my experience you have the exact same control over
your CMS as your email. In both cases, corporate IT will be the guys
installing and managing the solution, and they're probably more experienced at
backing up Outlook than whatever solution you come up with and foist on them.

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gengstrand
Not necessarily so. Email is usually company wide so the backup can be
extremely large which increases the chances that it will fail. Your CMS may
only be for your department or division so its backup will most likely be much
smaller. As far as the actual procedures for conducting a backup, that's
usually not too complicated.

By the way, Outlook is only the email client. The back end is called Microsoft
Exchange.

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m0digital
To help reduce the clutter of group emails you try MooGroups.
<http://moogroups.com>

We are in the early stages. Let me know if you have any questions.

-Steel

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jimfl
Also, when you send an email, the content is instantly dead. You can't correct
it, you can't edit it, and you can't improve upon it.

Generally, when you send an email, there is some context, many times also
electronic, and the mail is disconnected from that context. The content of
collaboration should be close to what is being collaborated upon, and tools
for work (i.e. IDEs, SCMS) should be designed to support collaborative
communication.

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JimmyL
That's often the point - to provide an immutable record of a conversation or
of the passing (or not passing) of a message. As much as this is against the
spirit of an agile workplace, the "deadness" of an email (and the external
time stamping) is a critical part of most people's corporate CYA routines.

I work in a moderately-progressive workplace, and if I ever need to seek the
input of a supervisor on a big issue/something that may come back to haunt me,
I'll talk to them about it, and then send them an email saying what we
decided. This makes it clear what the decisions was (and more importantly, how
I interpret it) and provides documentation to both sides that the issue was
discussed and a conclusion reached.

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aw3c2
The title of the page is _5 Reasons Why You Should Stop Using Email to
Collaborate_. Please do not use your own labelling. Especially not twisted
sensationalism like this.

The conclusion of the article is ___any CMS (Content Management System) that
supports commenting will work_ __. That does not help me at all nor is it
clear what he means. Maybe he is talking about a specific niche? Bad article.

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gengstrand
Permit me to elaborate. So, you are in Drupal or Plone or Sharepoint and you
are looking at a page. Maybe the page has content which is rich text
formatted. Maybe the page also includes a link to a MS DOC file or PDF. The
content of this page is the document that you are collaborating on. If so
configured, then you will also find some kind of "reply" or "comment" link at
the bottom of that page. You also see everyone else's previous comments about
this document. This is how team members can collaborate on that document
instead of emailing each other about it.

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dfreidin
Sounds almost like an advertisement for Google Wave, except that Wave is never
mentioned once.

