Enterprise activity stream - email conversations with externals staying threaded in the stream
On my tumblr blog I posted about email being sucked into an activity stream (dashboard), and the owner being able to make it public, or replying to the email from within the stream, etc… The idea being that email, is just like flickr, youtube, delicious…it’s just yet another source…but it’s different in that people only see it, if you click a button to make it public.
I suggest you read the tumblr post to get up to speed.
Now…
Imagine an enterprise version of friendfeed as your social network/microblogging/activity stream eg. Socialcast
Firstly, let’s get this out of the way…when having a discussion, and you need to write an extended reply, you don’t need to use email as the enterprise activity stream allows more than 140 characters…which is good as this doesn’t split up the conversation.
Now imagine if an enterprise activity stream allowed you to follow your email client (of course no-one else could do this for privacy reasons).
Wow, bye bye email inbox, as the enterprise activity stream is the new inbox.
From within enterprise activity stream you could reply to this email which would send an Outook email, or if the receiver is on enterprise activity stream you could reply with a comment…look at that a conversation thread where each element may have happened on different products.
At any point you can cherry pick one of your emails that you see in your enterprise activity stream and make it public in your profile stream. People following you will now see the Outlook email title and click it to read it.
You could also do this at the time of sending your email from Outlook ie. when you send your email to someone it will also appear in your enterprise activity stream profile.
Same when replying to an Outlook email from the enterprise activity stream ie. when in the enterprise activity stream you send a reply to Outlook and it can also be made public in the activity stream
Hmm, not sure if you could send an Outlook email (not a reply, but a new email) from within the enterprise activity stream…that would be like sending a tweet from Friendfeed…not a reply tweet, but an initial tweet..or a direct message, etc…
Now imagine this…
You are using your enterprise microblogging/activity stream to do a task with co-workers.
If you need to liase with someone in your company who is not on the task, you can still use the enterprise activity stream
eg. in the comment of the task post you could @reply to this person on the edge of the task, and they can comment back.
This way your co-workers know what is happening on your leg of the task ie. you don’t have to tell them (report back to base), or narrate your work…in this instance, there is no such thing as an “update”, as they “observing” you work in the open.
Now this ain’t gonna work if the person on the edge of the task is an external party eg a vendor, supplier, client.
But what if you were in Outlook and sent the supplier an email and also chose for it to post in the enterprise activity stream as well….or perhaps you are in the enterprise activity stream and choose to create an email which becomes a post as well (or create an email which becomes a comment within a post)…this is sending the Outlook email from within the microblogging app itself so it instantly becomes a post or a comment.
Voila, your co-workers know exactly what stage you are at. They don’t have to ask you how you are going with the supplier, they already know, as you cross-posted the email you sent the supplier as a comment under the task post in the stream…this didn’t have to happen after the fact, this cross-posting can happen at the time you are sending the email (keeping in mind the email can be sent from Outlook or from within the stream).
Now when the supplier replies to your email you will see that in Outlook or your enterprise activity stream, depending where you are at the time…we hope that our head is no longer in Outlook as the enterprise activity stream is the new inbox/dashboard.
If you are in enterprise activity stream at that time, you can click a button to make it (the email reply from the sender) public so it appears as a comment.
If you are in Outlook at the time, you somehow have to also be able to make it send as a comment to your activity stream…I haven’t thought this through technically or how user-centric it is (ie. you don’t have to think). Making an email cross-post to the stream as a post is easy enough, but to cross-post it as a comment within a post means you need to email it to the post email address (or something like that), which sucks as it means you have to hunt around for this emailID, which is not smooth and user-centric…it would be a hassle…drag and drop would be nice 
![email.png](http://services.nexodyne.com/email/icon/GxbiQvgbwBgCnw%3D%3D/oIp%2BJMQ%3D/R01haWw%3D/0/image.png"){kind=icon}
John — Thanks for posting your ideas, along with a summary of points from of the Twitter discussion kicked off by your post from yesterday on what “sucking email into an activity stream” might mean, see keepstream summary.
Except for the fact that I do incoming email triage (from customers or others on the edge) from a Mac or Exchange mailbox rather than posting all content automatically, I can certify that an outline of what you describe works very well in practice.
It exists in Traction TeamPage and is the basis for my Tweets sharing experience with “email at the edge” throughout today’s Twitter conversation.
TeamPage incorporated email in and out since release 1.0, along with an email digest, email reply, and ability to email content out and log an activity stream record of what was emailed, with an activity stream link to the cover email as sent.
In 2009, working with a major consulting firm who have an army of folk who live on their Blackberries, Traction Software introduced TeamPage 4.2 with automatic email notification on new content, edits, tag actions etc and automatic cleanup and rethreading of replies as comments automatically attached to the new, changed or tagged object that triggered the email notification.
As I said in the Twitter thread, this has been provided a big boost to acceptance for folk who want to live on their Blackberries or smartphones and use email as a bridge to post content, get email notification, and use email to post replies as comments.
Based on this experience I suggested that it may be desirable to maintain the equivalent of individual mailboxes for incoming messages (unified at the UI level if desired), and curate a subset that is both sharable in context and of interest, any time after the email is received. With a compatible email system, I agree that cross tagging could work very well indeed.
Always happy share experience as well as openly discuss ideas and brainstorm on where this lead in the broadest terms - including but certainly not limited to Traction Software.
cheers,
Greg
Comment by Gregory Lloyd — February 17, 2011 @ 1:49 am
Nice post, John! I’ve posted my thoughts about this on my blog some time ago: http://info-architecture.blogspot.com/search/label/streaming I agree this is the future. I think this will extend even further incorporating document (versions), business applications (e.g. fill in hour registration etc). I’m looking forward to this future!
Comment by Samuel Driessen — February 17, 2011 @ 9:24 am
Hey Greg,
Yep good to cater for all experiences.
Our CoPs at work are yet another website that’s is jumping for people’s attention. We are lucky that the CoP can come to them. That is they can post content to the blog or forum email address, they can subscribe to get content in email, and send email replies to post comments.
Yep, Traction Software for me is the real leader in this space as it caters for real work, it’s not just a learning and sharing platform
Comment by John Tropea — February 17, 2011 @ 11:02 pm