Darwin magazine's December 3, 2003 "Write On" column offers Collaboration & The Problem With E-mail By Robert Hamilton and Ben Bradley, "New collaborative software tools offer ways to share information. But you'd rather rely on good ol' e-mail. Now there may be a halfway point." Ostensibly, the article introduces a product called Kubi, which takes email to the next stage of functionality, but I found the introductory information much more intriguing than the software. Consider these exerpts:

Consider the line "While we dwell in an environment of ever more precise and well-behaved tools, e-mail remains the original blunt instrument " - The point's been made to me a number of times. People live in their inbox. When we ask them to live in another application, for example a team space such as Groove, or a corporate Intranet webiste, they still spend the most time checking their inbox. Why does email always win out? One reason is that it's the most personalized - every email there was sent to *me*, and ideally, is something that I personally care to read. No wonder SPAM is so universally hated!

These other applications for collaboration were created for "uniting a dispersed team and making sense of the huge volume of information we excrete and consume everyday." The article continues, "We've looked at all these applications, tried a few but could never get over the hump of effectively using them. ... Just one teensy problem.... You need to alter your habits to use these tools. You need to visit the project site (or sites) often throughout the day, be sure to upload your documents to the project space so that everyone stays on the same page, and don't forget to cc the team workspace on that e-mail thread so that we capture the dialog for all members. They still rely of e-mail for the basic interaction."

So what's the answer? Most often, it's tying your collaborative application to your audience's inbox, using what I like to refer to as "nag mail". The messages can be very short, for example, "Dear Bob, new information has been posted to the XYZ workspace. Click here to read it." 

Wouldn't this be great for all your nagging? "Dear Son, new laundry is about to be added to the washing machine. Click here to gather your dirty socks and make a contribution to the next load".

7:53:36 AM    
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"Integration and time to value, it's the two messages I hear all the time[from CIOs], which is why I'm passionate about integration using open standards, because that's the only thing that is future proof. Everything you do today will be legacy within 90 days, and if it's not standards based, it's going to be a problem to integrate. And if you have to create code to integrate it, then you start to lose out on your time to value. "

7:41:30 AM    
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