Of course email is a great communication tool. Both businesses and individuals know how important it is for transacting work with the external world. But when it comes to team collaboration, email is bad.
As most people would know, dealing with email at work takes up a considerable amount of time with less than best results. When teams use email for intensive collaboration, there are just too many messages criss-crossing, and it becomes hard to bring it all together.
People may or may not mark all the mails concerned or title them correctly. Mistakes made in one message need follow-up mails that create more confusion than clarity. Updating information or messages or attached documents usually means another mail in the long chain of mails. Often leading to multiple chains around the same task or subject. Amongst all this email clutter, losing sight of priorities and objectives is easy.
So what is the antidote to all this email clutter?
The answer lies in Ideolve for team collaboration. Teams can use Ideolve as an extension of their mailing system to help share ideas, documents and information. They can work on initiatives intensely, over long stretches of time, without the loss of context.
A note created in Ideolve can carry the description of an idea, problem, task, initiative etc. with supporting images, documents etc. that can be shared with people who'd work closely on the project/assignment concerned. Team members can make their own contribution to the Ideolve note with ideas and information and initiate tasks around the project. Notifications for all the activities on the note is shared with the team via an app and/or email alerts. Notes themselves can be grouped together using tags to tie them into bigger ideas or initiatives.
Because all the information and conversations around a note is in the same place, there is little duplication and fragmentation and little need to poke each other with messages. It is easy to draw the attention of a team member for a pending response via @name tags. Inserting @name tags automatically sends out an email alert with the link to the note/comment, to the tagged person’s mail box.
In our use of Ideolve for team collaboration, we've noticed an 80%+ drop in email traffic. Our mail boxes now mostly has mails related to our transactions with the outside world. It has done more for making it easier to handle email than any other trick we've seen to organise and gain control of the unruly mail box.