Accept no substitutes

#noemail – Exformatics Ditch Internal Emails

Exformatics

Okay so Denmark-based Exformatics does have a dog in the fight; they make and market the Anywhere app which let’s you manage activity streams more effectively on your mobile devices. But that also means that they will soon have an even deeper understanding of activity stream management throughout their company.

First payoffs? During #nomail January, all email use dropped 55% and yielded streams of more focused and better shared information. Largest drops in email use was among management — less meaningless CC, acknowledgements, “here’s my report,” etc. “CTO Morten Marquard managed to cut the amount of emails to 1/3 compared to November 2011.”

“We spend a disproportionate amount of time reading, contemplating and answering emails, that could have been dealt with far more rapidly and more efficiently face to face, in the activity stream or via the designated task concept in our intranet solution. We want to get rid of internal emails. Externally, we have to use email for communicating with customers and suppliers – at least for now,” Morten Marquard, CTO in Exformatics says.

The substitute for internal emails is activity streams – the business oriented equivalent of statuses in e.g. Facebook, Google+ and other social media. The activity stream is central in the solution for intelligent Enterprise Content and information Management that is used by the employees. Instead of filling up individual inboxes with notes, questions, tasks, these can be shared on a specific activity, case or project. This way, employees with already full schedules get rid of context switching and interruptions from email popups.

Full article at SharePoint Europe.

2 Comments

  1. Joel Dunn

    The challenge is finding the right backend system to organize the activity streams. Google tried with Wave, but it didn’t take. They are trying again with Google+, which I really think of as more of a collaboration engine than a social system. Facebook has low a signal to noise ratio. I’m not enamored of using something as heavy as Sharepoint on the back end to organize the streams. What will have the right level of flexibility but not be overly complicated? In the 2 minutes I’ve been thinking about and typing this, I’m wondering if Drupal could do the job…hmmm…

  2. Paul

    On iOS, the notifications system does a nice job. In my requests for the future that I gave during my talk last night at NCSU, I said again: My first request is activity stream integration. But my second is for simplified management of the integrated stream. Wave didn’t do part 2 very well. But Wave is now, I believe, Open Source. A smart team of software engineers could make a Wave-that-doesn’t-suck.

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