Stop the Madness Called Email | Hacker News Reader

Stop the Madness Called Email

it.toolbox.com

6 pointsgengstrand10 comments

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

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?

>> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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