Reply to All

Earn permission to respond

This is a great (and short) blog post by Seth Godin on the topic of being accessible and making it easy for people to initially contact you.  Think about the last time you wanted information or were looking to buy something.  Did you want to answer a bunch of questions or provide a lot of information about yourself?

Email contact is like a first date. If you show up with a clipboard and a questionnaire, it's not going to go well, I'm afraid. The object is to earn permission to respond.

Keep it simple.  Request an email address or make it easy for people to send you an email with some questions (and be sure to respond quickly!).  This is just the beginning of the discussion not the end.

Email policy enforcement goes mainstream

Microsoft announced the public beta of Exchange Server 2010 today and it includes something called "MailTips" to add a layer of oversight to end-user actions.  No, this is not big brother. This is about self-policing.

I view this as further confirmation that the enterprise needs a greater level of control and monitoring over what happens in their email systems. For many years during my tenure at both Orchestria (now assimilated by CA) and MessageGate, we advocated and demonstrated how varying degrees of control and monitoring could not only reduce risk but save money. Absent specific security or compliance regulations, most companies need to focus solely on the end-user and their daily activities by putting the control and oversight directly in their hands.

Functionality like MailTips is targeting the hardest problem to solve - end user behavior. One of the use cases referenced in John Cook's TechFlash post is one that we always saw and specifically measured for customers at Orchestria and MessageGate. It is way too easy to inadvertently send something outside the company with auto address completion and the like. Where it gets tricky is when the definitions of outside and inside are complex like across business units, joint ventures, or subsidiaries all with multiple domains and constantly changing employees.

I am confident that MailTips will satisfy the baseline use cases for the end-user but there is still a need for technologies that can handle additional complexity or where more robust rules and dispositions are required.

The email cloud goes local

News out from the Google folks at Gmail that there is now an offline capability being offered through Labs.  Interesting move to enable the client when not connected utilizing Gears.  Just checked my various Gmail accounts and it is not available there yet but do look forward to using it.

UPDATE:  Am now set up on both personal and biz Gmail accounts

Check out LiveOffice

I'm excited to have the chance to help out Nick Mehta and the LiveOffice team a bit.  They provide a solution that combines a couple of my favorite topics - email and SaaS.  If you are looking for a better way to handle the costs and effort related to managing MS Exchange, compliance, or archiving and retention, check them out (here's their blog).

Gmail embraces 'Inbox Zero'

Or at least is helping you achieve this highly sought after state.  New feature via Labs allows you to send and archive the email thread all in one step. 

'All@' groundrules

If you run a company, start a company, or are an executive at a company, this should be on the radar screen - who can send to the 'all@yourcompany.com' alias.

Email is great at broadcasting news and updates around the office - both good and bad.  It is also a nice way for anyone to send anything to everyone.  Put some simple controls in place that allow only members of the executive team, HR, and Marketing (for internal communications) to use this alias.

I watched this in real life at a previous start up both before and during several RIFs (reductions in force).  What really got my attention was when an especially animated employee decided to cc the 'all' alias in a completely over the top argument he was having via email.  Individual responses telling him to stop were then broadcast back to all in his reply - good times were had by all.  After this incident, these controls were promptly implemented.

You will save yourself some pain and embarrassment especially given the season of layoffs that we are wading through.  Nothing like a snarky farewell email to the entire company to blow the lid off the best laid RIF and accompanying communications plan. 

Sign of the times

Boston College is no longer going to give incoming freshman email (via ReadWriteWeb).  They'll get an address that will forward to their preferred existing inbox vs. an actual inbox.  Here's the story.

This is an interesting story and touches on a trend we will see more of as younger folks enter the workforce with their on-line identities already established.  Of course, the workplace is different than college and the need for proper partitions between what is public and private will become even more important as will the ability to centralize, manage, and integrate the various message flows that come and go.

Showing its age and aspirations, Google promotes Gartner MQ placement

I was perusing the various RSS feeds I work to scan everyday and this one from the Google enterprise blog caught my attention.  It is about Google being recognized as a "leader" by Gartner in their recent Email Security Boundary Magic Quadrant.  This is the product line from the Postini acquisition.

It struck me as a true sign of vying to be an established enterprise technology player when you tout recognition as a market leader by an analyst firm like Gartner Group.  Ten years into its life, Google shows us that it is not immune from having to play by the rules of the enterprise technology landscape. 

Thoughts on Xobni

Apologies for the extended delay in posting my thoughts on Xobni.  I have been using it since the first cycle of an exceptionally well run beta program started and have been collecting some thoughts over time.  I appreciate being given some early beta invites and dutifully distributed them making some new friends along the way.  I still have some if you’d like to take it for a spin.  Just shoot me an email - robertcpease at gmail dot com.

Recently the company has had some departures from the early executive team.  Not uncommon, but this is pretty early in the lifecycle of a company with momentum and is curious to say the least.  What I mean by momentum is that having Bill Gates demo your product as a brand new and unknown company is not a common occurrence.  The turnover could be the result of a new CEO and a company trying to move from being "clever" to being real, but is worth noting nonetheless.

First off, I am a huge believer in both how bad the email problem is for the enterprise as well as the potential that awaits those companies that come up with a way to improve it.  The challenge is to significantly improve it, not focus on replacing it or just rethinking the construct of the inbox. 

Email is way too pervasive and ingrained in all major workflows from selling to support and it will be many moons until the Facebook generation eradicates it from the workplace.  Also, for full disclosure, I spend time and energy on this topic thinking about the business opportunities that could be pursued.

Here's what I like:

• Great initial marketing and buzz
• Locating attachments
• Usable placement on the Outlook UI (expand/collapse)
• Conversation threading
• Search that is interesting and faster than Outlook search (even though it essentially the same searching)

Not so wild about:

• A quick key to draft an email that asks for a phone number that drops a bit of promotional text below the signature block that is not really appropriate in business setting.           

                 Build your address book with less effort - http://www.xobni.com/GetTheDigits

• The "Schedule time" quick key sends a clever email with time slots for the next few days with the same cheesy promotional text at the bottom but the available times are not tied into my actual calendar or reflecting true availability requiring me to still switch between my calendar and the email I am sending to get accurate availability.
• Single channel/single platform - email only and MS Outlook only (Yahoo Is apparently in the works)
• Analytics that are interesting but not meaningful.  Time of day by contact not meaningful and the graphic in the side bar seems like filler.

At this point and after using it for many months, I have not integrated it directly into my daily workflow.  I still use the calendar tab to schedule a meeting and I still use "new" to start a new email.  I did use it the other day to quickly find a phone number for someone not in my contacts.  Xobni extracted it and made it easier for me to find - definitely a time savings but I still could have found it without the tool after a bit of digging. 

A quick word about Outlook latency:  there are lots of things going on when starting, using, and closing Outlook even without a plug-in and that goes for any plug-in.  When I first loaded the beta version, I had some issues that they quickly resolved with subsequent releases and an uninstall/install on my part.   This is why you conduct a beta program – to see what will happen when it is used on a larger scale than your dev/QA environment. 

Their plug-in is not the only application (beta or otherwise) now fighting for control of Outlook as it starts on my desktop as I have Salesforce.com, LinkedIn, and a handful of other alpha/beta products vying for processor time.

On the analytics front, I learned about needing to make email data really meaningful doing email analysis at both Orchestria and MessageGate.  The data on its own is interesting but even more interesting when taken in context - a new recipient, an email without text and an attachment, concentrations of traffic of certain file types, etc.  Granted, my previous efforts focused on compliance issues but the need for relevance is the same if you are talking about supervisory review or personal use. 

All said, I like Xobni and look forward to seeing it evolve but don't think I'd pay for it assuming that is a milestone in their business plan.  If it becomes part of MS Outlook then I guess that is not an issue as that will open a huge distribution channel.

My view is not as harsh as Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg but I still think focusing solely on making the inbox better doesn’t solve the problem.

A few clever email plug-ins

Here's a story from Inc. magazine titled "Email's Little Helpers." After getting past the extremely corny name, there is a decent listing of a handful of tools that are designed to make the email experience better in some way.

Among those listed are Xobni and ClearContext. I have beta versions of both of these tools and am trying to use them in my daily activities. I have a review of Xobni in process and will post it shortly.

Also mentioned are freebie file transfer service YouSendIt and one that I had not heard of called Reply to All Monitor. Love the name but not sure I'd shell out $14.95 to keep me from a mistaken reply all email. YouSendIt is further commoditizing the file transfer space by making transfers of up to 100MB free with fee-based services starting above that or for more "secure" (password protected) transmission.

Most of these tools are focused on enriching the inbox or mail client experience and I believe are not really getting at the core problem with email. They focus on making the existing approach more efficient through things like better search vs. getting at the root cause issues like volume and relevance.