Email as a Collaborative Tool
The consensus here at the Collaborative Technologies Conference is that, as a collaborative tool, email stinks. Here are some of its faults:
There is too much of it
It is indiscriminate — everyone gets CC’d on everything
There is no discussion trail — the conversation gets scattered as people respond to emails which end up in multiple inboxes
File attachments are a pain — no version control — do I have the most recent version — if I change the document what happens to other people’s changes?
Spam, Viruses, Worms, etc.
Every email has the same priority
The problem with email is that everyone uses it all the time and we need to find something else better to wean them off this crutch. What is this killer app? Instant messaging, blogs, wikis, grou calendars, file sharing, all have pieces of the puzzle. Personally I think the aggregating quality of RSS, and the use of a mix of these types of technology, offers the best solution. What we really need is an integrated environment where there is one point of entry to manage these tools. And web-based is probably a good idea, so I’m not locked into using one workstation.
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