Transitioning from email to collaboration platform is a difficult problem. Technology of deploying collaboration platform is easy. What is difficult is getting people off from email and have them start using collaboration platform to start realizing the benefits of shared virtual group page.
As I wrote earlier in my blog post, I have been thinking about this problem for a while. This week, I've decided to look into a simple module that would make this transition easier.
Minimal Viable Product is a simple one. As an email user and collaboration early adopter, I want to start posting emails with long To and CC list to an internal collaboration system. The system will keep track of single master copy of the email thread and recreate the thread by timestamp. That's it.
No authentication to access control the email (most organizations are suffering from lack of information sharing, not from too much sharing), no fancy threading (people can make out who replied by looking at the email body sorted by timestamp), no sexy UI to render the email content (most people are still used to Outlook that has not changed much when it comes to reading emails), and no support for replying to email from the collaboration site (we need to take one step at a time; people are not simply logging in to collaboration site to look for the latest information).
What I need is a dead simple way to get my email thread out on collaboration system, and for others to do the same. Email recipients should have a choice of uploading their email to a collaboration site, and once uploaded it should be available to everyone who wants to follow the thread. Any subsequent email exchanges should automatically reflected on the collaboration system. Oh, and we cannot forget to notify all the recipients that the email thread is now hosted on collaboration site so that they can look at the latest discussion at any time.
It also musts support many internal collaboration systems. That's because collaboration system market is highly fragmented, and there is no sign that there will be any one dominant player unlike corporate email systems (refer to the Enterprise Social Market Share 2011).
So I wanted to ask you. Would something like this be useful to people? Do you know any solution that does something like this?
If so, I would love to hear from you.
As I wrote earlier in my blog post, I have been thinking about this problem for a while. This week, I've decided to look into a simple module that would make this transition easier.
Minimal Viable Product is a simple one. As an email user and collaboration early adopter, I want to start posting emails with long To and CC list to an internal collaboration system. The system will keep track of single master copy of the email thread and recreate the thread by timestamp. That's it.
No authentication to access control the email (most organizations are suffering from lack of information sharing, not from too much sharing), no fancy threading (people can make out who replied by looking at the email body sorted by timestamp), no sexy UI to render the email content (most people are still used to Outlook that has not changed much when it comes to reading emails), and no support for replying to email from the collaboration site (we need to take one step at a time; people are not simply logging in to collaboration site to look for the latest information).
What I need is a dead simple way to get my email thread out on collaboration system, and for others to do the same. Email recipients should have a choice of uploading their email to a collaboration site, and once uploaded it should be available to everyone who wants to follow the thread. Any subsequent email exchanges should automatically reflected on the collaboration system. Oh, and we cannot forget to notify all the recipients that the email thread is now hosted on collaboration site so that they can look at the latest discussion at any time.
It also musts support many internal collaboration systems. That's because collaboration system market is highly fragmented, and there is no sign that there will be any one dominant player unlike corporate email systems (refer to the Enterprise Social Market Share 2011).
So I wanted to ask you. Would something like this be useful to people? Do you know any solution that does something like this?
If so, I would love to hear from you.
Thanks for informative post. I am pleased sure this post has helped me save many hours of browsing other similar posts just to find what I was looking for.Thank you!
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