Email is a great tool. But it's often very complex relationship that we have with this service. It's very "love & hate" mixed together in different proportions - depends on the scenario we are using the service.
There is one scenario where we hate email a lot - business communication with groups of people. It's almost imposible to keep up with the threads. Messages, questions, attachments and tasks are mixed together. It gets worse when you use email to communicate with different project teams that are outside of your organization (i.e. your customers).
Aren't Project Collaboration tools like Basecamp already solving this problem?
In theory yes - but there are couple of unsolved issues.
1. Typical project collaboration tool doesn't work when you have many projects/cases/opportunities at the same time.
2. External participants (customers? partners?) are invited to the whole, often complex and ugly, project tool. They don't like the complexity. They don't like the overhead. They don't use it.
3. Most of the existing Project Collaboration tools are designed in a way that does not support managing multiple projects at the same time.
We think that its time to address those issues
Group Messaging app for business should be able to create meta-threads of conversations, tasks and files shared during the project.
Email must be part of the process. Business people will never give up their email (or they will not give it up within next few years for sure).
Customer workspace (interface that your customer can see when invited to the app) should be streamlined and super clean. This should also be branded (think ad hoc extranet for your customer).
If you like this concept you can try it out here: http://www.discoursehq.com
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2 comments:
Using emails to communicate with other business partners can be tedious, but it's one of the safest ways when it comes to communication most especially when sending important files. Applications that will allow easier communication can be helpful, but it is important to ensure its security before using and sending confidential files.
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