by Tom Mandel
May 29, 2007 at 11:42 am
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
In my last post, I reported on JP Rangaswami’s open email system. By opening his email to his staff, he has essentially created a ‘cost-free’ collaboration forum with no learning curve.
I can easily imagine the value of an email server add-on that would allow anyone to turn any email to which she had access into a message thread. Perhaps something like this exists.
Email has always been collaborative in some sense — that’s what “cc:” is for after all. Open email extends this utility. But there is more one could – and should – do with email.
Because email is chock full of tacit knowledge, it’s an ideal content base for tagging and social networking.
Collaborative groups are pre-defined – as in the case of JP’s staff – and leave little headroom for any ‘emergent’ result. People in the group share collective intelligence and add to it too, within the limits of the group.
But, if email could be tagged, we would share collective intelligence in an even more useful way and would allow people to integrate and extend knowledge by mashing up an even larger variety of sources — including, in this case, what must be the largest unstructured knowledge repository in existence: email.
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Interesting idea. Are you aware of any email tagging techology/offerings?
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MarkJune 8th, 2007 at 11:27 am |
We are on this idea. Email tagging in Outlook for now, but we’re also experimenting with using the same tags for files, web pages, blogs, wikis, etc. Basically an aggregation mechanism using tags.
Mark
http://www.sidefinder.net
Taglocity allows you to tag emails, and people can send them to you pre-tagged…so perhaps if emails were an open system we could have an email tagcloud.
I have a post on email collaboration:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/01/30/email-collaboration-re-visited-forum-add-on-9cays-and-grouptivity/
Tom, I think there is an application that meets more business needs than open email system. It is Wrike, a web based tool integrated with e-mail. It allows you to tag e-mails, share and collaborate on them. Then you can organize these tasks in projects and manage them. You can also have a picture of projects switching to the timeline view.
Glad to know about Wrike, Valerie — and you work for Wrike don’t you. Tell us a little more about it.
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PankajMay 22nd, 2009 at 5:00 pm |
i disagree that email can be used as an effective collaborative and social tool. the information is hidden away in everybody's own inbox. it creates individual silos of information, let alone group silos. moreover, there is no distinction between different types of information – documents, contacts, tasks, events – which makes email a completely arbitrary mode of information management.
collaboration through email also causes an email torrent (everyone talking to everyone else), and there is tremendous duplication of information (everytime someone uses the reply or forward button).
we recently did a whitepaper on the subject if youre interested – http://www.hyperoffice.com/business-email-overloa...
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