An article I wrote for IDM magazine earlier in the year about managing email in the enterprise is now available to read in full on the Headshift Australasia blog. This was intended to be a counterpoint to technology-centric approaches to dealing with email overload, so let me know what you think.
Also cross posted to the Dachis Group's Collaboratory blog.
Over the years I’ve heard various reasons why employees like to keep their own personal email archives and they can be separated into three broad groups:
- Journaling - a chronology of what happened when and why;
- Personal Library - to record important information for future reference; and
- Non-repudiation - keeping copies of who said or did what, in case they need to be used as formal or informal evidence of responsibility.
Mark Nash proposes a nice little social media triaging system (Critical > Delayed > Rejected).
It reminds me that I blogged about being ruthless with RSS feeds back in 2007, but since that time the volume and access to different information and activity streams has definitely grown. Unfortunately it is also a reminder that our personal information practices that ultimately define our ability to control information overload continue to lag.
I wrote another piece about living with email, touching on similar issues. While the technologies are different, the common themes are:
Unfortunately, at least in an organisational context, until we start taking information work more seriously I think many people will continue to find information overload an issue.
In the meantime, remember that its ok to be ruthless with your social activity consumption.
The agreement is significant to Google as it has spent more than two years trying to court the university to adopt Gmail for staff members. But the university was hesitant to move staff members on to Gmail due to regulatory and cost factors.
They were concerned that their email messages would be subject to draconian US law.
In particular, they were worried about protecting their intellectual property under the Patriot Act and Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Mr Bailey said.
"In the end, Google agreed to store that data under EU jurisdiction, which we accepted," he said.
The university had to comply with state laws, which mandated that data had to be stored in NSW.
Google was not going to build a local data centre anytime soon so Macquarie had to maintain an offline archive of data at the university, he said. In the past, Macquarie was concerned about the cost of relaying large files to and from the US, where Google's data centre resides. But this been resolved thanks to the Australia's Academic and Research Network (AARnet), which the university is a member of. "AARNet peered with Google (and Microsoft) which means it won't cost us anything more," Mr Bailey said.
A $2 million limited liability was increased to $10m in case Gmail stopped working. "You need proper recourse if your free email service stops working."
Its important to note how Macquarie Uni resolved their concerns about moving staff mailboxes to Gmail... a combination of getting their off shored data managed under a more friendly jurisdiction, creating their own archive to comply with local law, data peering and risk management through increased financial liability provisions. A good checklist for other large Australian organisations that want to go down the same path?
Who needs OtherInbox?
Anyone who can't keep up with their email
OtherInbox is great for people who shop online, interact with friends on social networking sites, subscribe to mailing lists and newsletters, try new software and websites, and more. It’s even perfect for recruiters listing job openings or real-estate agents with properties for sale.
This sounds really, really good! While I try to use RSS as much as possible, I still find social networking and social media notifications waste a lot of time and space in my inboxes.
But I'm not sure I want to hand over my email password. And I'm sure corporate IT managers are going to really love this once they bring in support for Outlook, POP and IMAP mail services.
Thoughts?
Hmm. I'm not entirely convinced about this, however there is an argument that if you want to ease the introduction of new information work practices into people's work routines then you need to go where the users are. I was a big fan of Xobni when I was last using Outlook regularly. However Twitter and LinkedIn are very different paradigms to integrate into Outlook - Xobni augments what you are already doing in Outlook with additional information, but tools like Twinbox (the example above) is introducing a brand new information stream in parallel to email.
I also wonder if integration with an enterprise microblogging tool might actually be the better use case for this kind of integration? For example, Socialcast is an enterprise microblogging platform and they have talked about providing plugins for Outlook and Lotus Notes (I'm not sure if they actually came to fruition).
On the other hand, Socialtext's Signals takes a non-email activity stream approach. Their desktop applications (a cross platform RIA) combines microblogging with notifications about wiki page edits, blog posts, comments, profile changes.
What do you think? Is an email client the right place for enterprise users to learn about microblogging or are we just reinforcing the email interface. Or perhaps we should just give people as much choice as possible?
