Email really sucks as a collaboration tool doesn’t it? Everyone has to manage their own archives. New team members don’t have easy access to old discussions and shared documents. People lose or delete information that turns out to be important. Stakeholders get mistakenly or purposefully left out of discussions. Email inboxes get flooded with information their owners don’t need to see.
Yeah, email-as-collaboration-device sucks, it really does. But there’s got to be a reason it’s held ground against allegedly more advanced tools, tools like bulletin boards and groupware in the nineties, blogs and wikis and enterprise document management now.
The truth is that email is good enough for most workers’ collaboration needs. In fact, it works better than other options in many ways:
- Interoperability. Email allows you to use the client software and email service you want. People you communicate with get to use what they like.
- Personalized Organization. Organize and store email archives the way you like, not according to someone else’s idea of how one topic or message relates to another. Keep what’s important to you; delete the rest and increase the signal-to-noise ratio in your own information space.
- Easy access control. Send email just to the people that you want to see it. Don’t include people that shouldn’t see it. It’s not failsafe, but it sure is straightforward.
- Single point of information access. Offers an individual home base for conversation and collaboration. I have to visit numerous sites in the course of one job I have to find all the information I need. That’s because different organizations and groups put their shared information in different places. I usually end up saving a copy for myself anyway so it’s easily accessible the next time I need it. If everything came to my inbox, I could just live there.
Email suits the individual better than any collaboration software, because individuals have control over their inboxes, their archives, and who gets mail from them. In many cases, individuals can choose what software they use to access their mail and they can customize the email client with filters and rules.
A comment from Pranshu Jain on the post that started this conversation offers another reason for email’s staying power:
I completely agree with you. But the The problem with collaboration software is that , atleast in my company they have changed many times in last 6 years ( and with collaboration getting pace and importance,
its likely to change as many times in the next six years). So for now, I am happier archiving mails in my mailbox, Thanks to msn desktop search and google desktop search - I can find them too.
The usefulness and entrenchment of email as collaboration device is yet another barrier to the introduction of Web 2.0 technologies into the enterprise. Here’s where SAP’s got it right–integrating their ERP apps with the Microsoft Office suite, including Outlook, in the product known as Duet. For example, the Outlook mailbox integrates with the SAP budget management process.
Don’t bet on the demise of email-as-collaboration-tool.
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Email is not P2P. It is a server-centric, store-and-forward.
Email is not P2P. It is a server-centric
That’s a common misconception. The data is not stored permanently on servers (unless for backup/reference purposes) and all the logic of email management is in the client. Software like Exchange uses a server for shared calendars, etc.
A Reminder that Email is a Horrible Collaboration Tool
As Anne says email is a still around as a collaboration tool and I think will be for some time. But email can be used in many formats, some better than others. Using something like @Mail webmail software with its Ajax-based webmail interface and groupware gives benefits of Outlook yet with the flexibility of web 2.0 technologies. Perhaps this is indicative of email collaboration for the future and the direction email should be taking for enterprise use.
Another important quality of any collaboration medium is its “timing.” Email is interesting because it is basically a synchronous medium, where I say something then you say something, then it’s my turn again. At the same time, it’s not immediate (like instant messaging). You can take time over your replies, or just put them in the background for a while and do something else. One of the big frustrations of email is when it becomes asynchronous - when everyone is replying at once in a multiple recipient thread, and it’s hard to see who’s replying to whom.
Email also has a very simple, salient, yet not in-your-face notification mechanism - it’s easy to find out when when I have a new email, while at the same time I can ignore it until I’m ready to read it, much less to respond to it.
Contrast this with most multi-user collaboration tools. They are designed to be asynchronous - multiple people can work on the same topic at once. It’s difficult to know when something has been done to the work product, much less anything of interest. Successful multi-user collaboration tools tend to *use* email to notify stakeholders of changes, because it’s so much better than anything “native” to the tool would be.
Finally, email has an incredible advantage over *any* other tool, in that it’s by far the most ubiquitous communication channel, one that’s basically platform-agnostic. In that way it’s similar to Word, which has a similar level of ubiquity, and which is pretty much equally important as a collaboration tool for that reason.
Alternate collaboration tools will not enable persons using them to express themselves in full, grammatical and jargon-free sentences.
I guess email is the tool everybody’s got used to and it will be very hard to replace it. Another way is to complement it with Web 2.0 tools. That’s what Web 2.0 developers should really think about. In fact some of them already do. For example, project management app called Wrike.com uses emails for managing projects. Users are encouraged to create tasks via email, and then monitor their progress together again by getting email notifications to their inbox. Sounds pretty convenient, right?
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