Blogs And Wikis Move In As E-Mail Overload Becomes UnbearableBy THOMAS CLABURN
E-mail, the internet's killer app, is killing productivity. Even for workers who insulate themselves from pitches for porn and pills--up 59% in October from the previous month, according to e-mail management company Postini--occupational spam takes a toll: Mailing list messages, workgroup updates, e-mail alerts, and corporate communiqués demand attention, if not a reply.
Dealing with e-mail easily can become a full-time job. Heavy users receive 1,000 messages and 1,500 spam messages a week, estimates Richi Jennings, lead analyst with the e-mail security practice at Ferris Research.
E-mail applications "were never designed for people to get 100 e-mails a day," laments Anil Dash, VP of professional products for blogging software company Six Apart. Some people get more than that, some less. But there's no getting around the fact that it's getting harder to process all the incoming information. Where once AOL's "You've Got Mail!" was an affirmation of popularity, today it sounds like an unwelcome diagnosis.
To get things done, knowledge workers are adopting more manageable forms of messaging like blogs and wikis. And as organizations attempt to coordinate dispersed groups around the world, they're adopting blogs, wikis, and other collaborative communication software to make messaging manageable. E-mail apps often have limited searching, sorting, filtering, and customizing features, as well as list-oriented interfaces that become unwieldy under large loads. But group collaboration software gives users more control and better tools for defining how incoming information gets processed and presented.
"E-mail is totally broken for me, as it is for many other people," says D.L. Byron, principal at Textura Design and the author of Publish And Prosper: Blogging For Your Business (New Riders Press, 2006). Textura Design, a Web design company and business blogging provider, went with Basecamp, online project management software from 37signals that's similar to blog and wiki software, Byron says. It provides a central online repository for shared files, persistent communication, and project goal tracking.
Not only does Textura Design use it internally, but Byron insists that the company's clients, many of whom have firewalls on their corporate networks that get in the way of exchanging files, use it to communicate about projects.
Six Apart, maker of Movable Type blogging software, is seeing companies deploy blogs to communicate with customers and internally to track projects. "E-mail has been overused and abused for project management in organizations," says Christopher Alden, executive VP and general manager of Movable Type. "Yet the reason people use e-mail is because it's easy, it's lightweight, it's quick. No one's nervous about authoring an e-mail. So blogs are hitting that middle zone in many different ways."
Publishing software company Quark has in place systems that "are so heavyweight that people don't use them," says Julie Fouge, senior internal communications specialist at Quark. Last December, it launched a corporate wiki provided by MindTouch. It has proven so successful that Quark has abandoned its intranet for the wiki.
Weighing in at roughly the size of a toaster, the MindTouch DekiBox, a plug-in-and-play wiki appliance, is lightweight as traditional IT installations go. It took only a few hours to get Quark's IT group trained. For users, the basics can be learned in five minutes."We flipped the switch and people started contributing to it from day one," says Fouge.
The wiki has made posting files and information for internal use much easier, keeping some files out of the e-mail system. It also has reduced the amount of time the company's IT staff spends helping users with collaboration issues.
Enterprise software maker SAP adopted Movable Type blogging software as an internal communication channel. Enterprise-friendly features, like its management console and ability to oversee multiple blogs, made Movable Type a good fit, says Jeff Nolan, who left SAP in September after eight years with its venture capital group to become the CEO of custom application startup Teqlo.
Blogging proved popular at SAP, without extensive evangelism to the company's 35,000 employees. "It was pretty remarkable how word of mouth took over," says Nolan. "Our page views went up consistently over time, as did our download rate."
"E-mail has really broken down in large companies," he says. "We were hamstrung in our ability to talk to the rest of the organization, because we were using e-mail," Nolan says of his time with SAP. "My group was competing for attention just like every other group. I wasn't going to get any attention using e-mail."
But a blog community didn't develop, which is to say that readers didn't offer much in the way of comments or interaction. Nolan attributes that to a reserved corporate culture.
Not everyone is ready to give up on e-mail, not by a long shot. Jennings of Ferris Research observes that when he hears people say "e-mail is broken," they usually mean "my spam filter is broken" or the user interface for dealing with quarantined messages is poorly designed. But even if e-mail is here to stay, some of its power users are packing their bags.
