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Michael Sampson from Foldera has added a great post to the email for collaboration meme, deducing that most of the issues are people problems dealing with the new collaborative technology services (laziness, culture, fear, time, etc..), he also adds the there are some collaborative features that the email client lacks.
A while back I posted on how blogs can be used instead of email for some purposes, this post focuses on the position of email in document collaboration.

NOTE: I must get round to posting about Foldera, I’m really interested to see how it works from a collaboration and PIM (personal information management) way.

If we could deal with the cultural adoption issue with enterprise 2.0, basically “people problem”, we will see that things can be much more fluid, induce sharing and innnovation, and create communal knowledge banks (corporate memory).

I think it’s going to take a long while, it’s not just the baby boomers, there are lots of people in their 30’s who haven’t grown up with social technologies. This is a barrier to learn new technology as they are not accustomed to it, unlike the MySpace generation who will quickly get the hang of new social technologies.

Anyway, I was thinking of a work scenario where I had to collaborate on a document, and how email was going to be cumbersome, and in the end would not leave a neat presented trail where others can visit the process of the collaboration that took place.

Scenario

I have a presentation (ppt) and need to get an opinion or review of the document from 4 or 5 colleagues around the globe.

First thing is to have a tele-conference with screen sharing, like WebEx, but I am thinking of a more asynchronous communication as people are sleeping when others are awake, that also leaves IM out of the question.

Firstly I will initiate with an email, now if we used a blog I would rather use this as an announcement , or even a forum, but then again since I only want to involve select people from our team I will use email.

I can attach the document or the email can contain a link to see the document in the DMS (Document Management System).

An email chain will begin, problem is that it starts to get messy, as person 1 will reply to my email and so will person 2, at the same time they are CC’ing the others, person 3 might reply to the email sent by person 2, person 4 might be really annoying and send a brand new email.

And what if a reply, forward or new email accidentally left out one of the participants, leaving them out of the loop.

What happens is you need to make a folder for these emails, as you now have lots of emails, instead of one linear chain, so it is messy when you are re-tracking the conversation that has transpired. Gmail to some extent has overcome this problem as emails in the same conversation are collated, ie. all the separate replies are collapsed together. This just saves 2 steps; the trouble of creating a folder and remembering to organise all these emails into the folder, but it still doesn’t make it any easier in re-tracing the conversation thread, reason why is email is not a forum.

Forum

The other problem is the silo effect, who knows all this even took place besides the participants, where can new comers join the conversation and add insight (even if they come past it by accident). Your boss might want an update, you can just send a link to the forum topic and let them see for themselves, although your boss probably would want a consolidated version.
Instead a forum could be used.

A forum is open for all to see, it communicates just like email, it enables to read the conversation in a linear thread, and it is a knowledge packet to stay (people may browse across it, or it may turn up in search results).

Naturally, when a topic discussion closes or dies down you may create a document, wiki page, FAQ, blog post distilling the forum topic.

Wiki

Instead of creating the presentation (ppt) I could draft it in a wiki (a page for each slide)…then at the end it would be good to be able to convert the wiki to powerpoint.

I would send the initial email to the team to please review.
Each person could leave comments on each wiki page, if they wanted to they could also modify each page and explain why in the comments.

Afterwards, or during (via email or RSS notification), I could look at each version (version history) and know who created it, and also read their comments, and view the red mark-up changes.

Then I could add a new version with comments, etc…

Then I would email the participants to ask if they are happy, or the comment in my last version would ask all other participants to comment if they are happy.

In the end I only used human to human email for the initial request.
Throughout the process the participants would be nudged through email notifications or even RSS.

It is easier sending off an email to collaborate because sending an email is easy, but then you pay for it when you try to keep track of the progress. And in the end you have nothing to share but the final product, whereas the working out is probably one the most important aspects in km (knowledge management).
Sure people can search in the DMS and find a handy document, not needing to re-invent the wheel, but the next step they take is to speak to the person who created the document to get some background. What if that person is not available, or not around anymore, well, the metadata in the final document could have links to the blog, wiki, forum where the process took place. These formats would come up in the search anyway.

DMS

Perhaps the presentation (ppt) can be added to a DMS for collaboration, without needing a wiki.

At the moment the DMS I use has version control, but lacks red mark-up changes, or perhaps we just don’t have this module.
Also there is no way for me to comment on a version of a document, unless I use a field in the metadata.

I’m sure DMS’s have red mark-up changes, and there would be a way to comment on a version, or perhaps the latest version has a stream of all the comments (also allowing replies), and all this could be notified by email or RSS notifications.

NOTE: In a DMS you could use blog posts to comment on what you have done to the new version, and people can reply in the comments…remember a blog is a more openly visible system than communicating via email.

To this effect, using the DMS would be actually easier than using a wiki, plus DMS’s have lots of metadata and the document is already in PPT, and people don’t have to learn the wiki technology.

In hindsight the process of the whole task is viewable by anyone, and the final product can be viewable.
It’s like a public viewing of your answer to a maths equation and all the workings out, including the input from others who helped you.

The difference with a wiki is that it really isn’t a regular document, it is a website, pages are linked to each other, you can make a navigation site map, you can organise sections or pages in categories.
Plus a wiki might not be the ultimate format you the need the document to be; JotSpot is getting round this by creating format type wiki pages, like spreadsheets.

Office 2.0

I suppose you could use a service like Zoho, where your documents have version history, their own personal DMS (plus version history), notifications and sharing features. In this respect the Office 2.0 web service is ont only the word processor, but it records versioning, sharing, and management of documents, like a DMS.
Just like the DMS and the wiki, you don’t necessarily need email throughout the process as there is version history and collaboration, but still there is a need for comments (a space to explain the changes you made), this purpose along with notification is used instead of email.

NOTE: In my related links at the end of this post, there is a post on office 2.0 cutting into the DMS market.

OFF ON A TANGENT: Another advantage with Office 2.0 is still allowing to use the service offline. Basically a plugin to open Zoho documents in MSword and to save word documents in Zoho, so you can use both offline (MSword) and online (Zoho) tools to create and edit your document. Also instead of MSword you can use an offline version of Zoho Writer.

You don’t really need a hosted online file storage if you use Zoho, as storage obviously comes with the service, I use Box.net for my file storage for files not created with an office 2.0 service. Sometimes if you click on a weblink it will open a PDF without showing a URL, so I have to save it to my desktop, open Box.net and upload it, this is laborious.
I’d like to get a plugin, to right click, or a bookmarklet to save a particular webpage directly to Box.net, and also to be able to right click on one of my desktop documents, and save it to Box.net.

Zoho have more treats; opening search hits in Zoho, embedding parts of a document into a webpage, and real-time collaboration.

I guess real-time services is another aspect in document collaboration.

Scattered information

Now even though you have decided to collaborate not using email, you have the issue of trying to remember where you have interacted. I guess you will have the email notifications of your interactions on various assignments, but you could of deleted these.

Someone might ask you to find all the assigments you have worked on, since you don’t collaborate with email you would have to remember the number of assignments and where they live: forums, wikis, blogs, documents, etc…

You could use your favourites to links on all the forums, blogs, wikis, documents, etc.. you have collaborated on…this is where a personal homepage comes into action, as you can have a space to collect all these interactions, kid of like if you had channels in a service like Ziki.

Bring collaboration into email

An idea is to be able to do everything from within the email client, at the moment you can browse the web and perhaps browse some internal applications like a DMS, but what about interacting with these applications using email:

- read a document from your DMS, and add or edit a document via a new mail (not sure about this)
- read a wiki page, and add, edit, comment via a new email (not sure about this, but I’m sure you can)
- read a blog post, and add, edit, comment via a new email (this can be done, besides editing)
- read a forum post, and add or reply via a new email (this can be done)

One of the first points in this blog post was that using forums to collaborate had many more winning features over email, except that you have to learn how to use a forum, and people are addicted to email.
By being able to post to a forum and reply to these posts using email is the killer comprimise. Actually it is not a comprimise it is complementary and just a feature of convenience.
In this respect the participants may never visit the forum, but yet they are contributing to it, magic!!

NOTE: this post is focused on document collaboration, maybe others could post on other aspects of collaboration such as tasks, scheduling, perhaps more project management based collaboration eg. re-scheduling a task on the webpage for all to see, plus it sends an RSS or email notification, perhaps even recall the previous email messages, or re-ordering or replacing your RSS feed post, like SLE.
There are lots of web 2.0 group management tools, I mentioned a few in this post, I’ve yet to have a reason to try them out, but I’m interested how they collate a lot of features into the one tool. eg. wild apricot, centraldesktop, basecamp, etc…
It seems along side Zoho, Google is slowly creeping into this space (Google Apps), they now have lots of offerings, they just need to intergrate them into one big service: All types of search (alerts), email, calendar, IM/talk/files, wiki (JotSpot), word processing, spreadsheets, create websites, start page (widgets), blogs, RSS Reader, toolbar (? browser), bookmarks, groups, mobile access, photo’s, desktop search, notebook, maps…

Here are some posts in this space.

Perhaps I’ll start looking at all-in-one project collaboration by checking out Foldera, since reading a post from one of the guys from the team motivated me to write this post.

This space varies as some services deal more in productivity and stringing it together based on project or people themes, whereas some go beyond productivity into creating the applications themselves.

In saying this, some services can act as a dashboard (eg. start page), then some services are based on productivity (and have their own email, tasks, calendar, IM, DMS and a way to string or share this information), then some go beyond this into more complex applications like, word processing, spreadsheets, etc…

Foldera

I wonder how a service like Foldera that is re-inventing the email productivity and organising processes of the email eco-system fits into this equation.

After a look, it is not really only about email, it’s about organising your productivity into themes.
Well I guess it has the PIM features of Outlook, it has it’s own services like : IM, tasks, contacts, calendar, email, but it also has a document manager (where you can collect documents).

The whole premise is the activity folder, you can have a folder for an assignment, which is a dashboard for all your interactions and documents eg. all your email, documents, tasks, IM in context of the activity, and all this organising happens automatically, because you are working on a particular activity you do it from within this folder, for email, it’s like having themed inboxes.

Wow, they have a comments feature, which kind of answered my question on a comment stream for a document (it is also available for tasks, and events), and it is tied to the document, the Document Manager must have a comments metadata field for the document.
I guess you can only see these comments and the document itself, if you have accesss to the shared public activity folder which means you can view it in your personal activity folder. I’m assuming this is how it works.

So in Outlook you have a calendar, but you can also have public calendars for the event or meeting room. I assume Foldera allows a comment stream for the event or meeting in this room, instead of having to fire off emails.
Assuming again, this public calendar is themed into public activity folders, this means the team must create a public activity folder, then from the personal activity folder (with perhaps the same name), you share stuff from a drop down menu into the public activity folder.
I assume like Outlook, you can look at the overall public calendar to see all events/meetings for all activities taking place.

Maybe comments for Contacts would be good, so you can say “Out of Office, gone to Brazil for the week”, and someone could even reply to your comment without having to email eg. “Could you come back earlier”.

Only thing I don’t understand is if someone sends you an email that is not a reply, how does it know which inbox or should I say which activity folder it is assigned to. I assume if they send the email from an activity of the same name it will be able to match the activity folder, but what if a person who doesn’t use Foldera, and is not replying to a Foldera email, sends you an email.

Also, what if 2 people share the same email into the public activity folder, perhaps it will say this item already exists.

Actually I may have the public activity folder idea wrong, as on the website it says you can share your personal activity folder by making it public, instead of what I’m thinking, which is sharing into a communal folder.
(If they do have communal folders, these are like knowledge packets for a project for all to see (corporate memory).
Imagine finding a similar project in Foldera to a project you are working on, you will have access to documents, converations (email/IM), their tasks, calendar (time scale), contacts, particpants, etc…all in the one spot…great for a handover.

Some features to add for each activity folder might be a: wiki, blog, forum, FAQ, timelines…and I guess SMS and mobile access all come into play.
(I feel the granular comments feature acts as a type of blog or posting forum at the item level, but an overall activity blog or forum could also be an option).

See the rest of the features and benefits on sharing, notifications, etc..

Check out their blog for lots of interviews.

As I mentioned there are lots of web 2.0 based project management tools which provide a productivity toolkit with sharing features, but how does it all come together, do they use themes like Foldera.

Productivity, sharing, communicating and collaborating from the one stop shop is want we want, all our tools integrated, but that is just part 1 of the equation, part 2 is being answered by Foldera, how is this information organised, so all you have to worry about is content.

Related:
Events : DMS and wiki
Wiki and EDMS
Wikis EDMS and office 2.0
My Documents 2.0

[ADDED 2/02/07: Email collaboration re-visited (forum add-on, 9cays, Grouptivity and QuickTopics), Document collaboration re-visited (NextPage2, PleaseReview and QuickTopic)]