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Collaboration

Email in the enterprise: entering its twilight at 40?

While it’s certainly premature to declare email “dead” as a technology, it’s fair to acknowledge that a new generation of communication tools is gaining traction as a more effective means of communication for the enterprise. Miguel Valdés Faures of BonitaSoft offers some alternatives. Read More »

What’s wrong with email today? That’s the question posed to me recently on Twitter, and considering that I use email as a primary method of communication, I was happy to think of a few ways to help tame the inbox. Read More »

 
 

Many have discussed email etiquette, but for the average web worker, the notion of politesse can seem counterproductive. Here, then, are five golden rules for respectful, productive digital communication, whether you’re using email, IM, video chat, phone, or other communications tools. Read More »

The key to remaining productive is to not let the many distractions in your work day sidetrack you from your primary job. Here are a few tips for taking charge of your day and kicking a few of the most common distractions to the curb. Read More »

ccLoop wants to improve email by making it into a better and more streamlined communication tool. It effectively offers a business-focused take on the familiar kind of mailing list functionality provided by the likes of Google Groups and Yahoo Groups. Read More »

Most of us are drowning in email. Could a solution be to impose a Twitter-like character limit on emails? Baltimore, MD-based 410Labs thinks so; its Shortmail service enforces concise emails by limiting messages to 500 characters or less and disallows attachements Read More »

It’s no surprise that Google is looking to use its new platform, Google+, to add a social layer to the company’s existing services. It seems the company wants to forge ahead with plans to incorporate some of Google+’s social features into its flagship webmail product, Gmail. … Read More »

Today, I stumbled across a new prospect for email management, SaneBox, which can automatically prioritize and sort email into folders. Could this new hopeful mean the end of email insanity, as it claims? Time will tell, but it looks very promising. Read More »

If you use Outlook and often forget to include attachments in your emails, check out CodeTwo’s Outlook Attachment Reminder, which scans the text of outgoing email for certain keywords. If one of the keywords is present and an attachment is not, it pops up a warning. Read More »

As email passes 40, is a midlife crisis in the cards?

A few weeks ago, electronic mail, or email as it’s now affectionately known, hit the respectable age of 40. Four decades since the first message – believed to be “QWERTYUIOP” – email seems to be going strong. But is it about to hit a midlife crisis? Read More »

Many of us are drowning in email, and Chris Anderson, curator of the TED conferences, thinks it’s time to address that by creating an “email charter” to reduce the amount of unnecessary email sent and to make the email we do send easier to process. Read More »

The daily email deluge is the scourge of productivity, but how can you stem the tide? Over at Six Pixels of Separation, Twist Image president Mitch Joel suggests that you should tell people in your emails how to work with you. Read More »

More Must Reads

Tired of sending the same old emails, over and over? Tout is a web app that allows you to create email templates, schedule and send templated emails, manage contacts and track the success of the sent emails to optimize your communications. Read More »

I make extensive use of smart folders and tags to sort my email into logical groups that I can easily process all at once. The key is to use rules and filters that automatically sort my email without any additional intervention from me. Read More »

One of the problems with conducting so much work communication via email is that a lot of useful information ends up being locked away inside people’s inboxes. GrexIt allows Google Apps users to move specified conversations from their inboxes into a shared, searchable repository. Read More »

The sort of “Let’s Get Away From It All” vacation immortalized in the popular song may be a thing of the past. A new study confirms that web workers are increasingly accepting of being contacted for work while on vacation. Read More »

Fyels is an ultra-minimal drag-and-drop file sharing app that makes sharing large files with colleagues or clients a breeze. Head to the website, and then drag and drop your file onto the dropzone. Once the file is uploaded, you’ll be provided with a ready-shortened link. Read More »

Keeping an email address book up-to-date is a fairly labor-intensive task. Kwaga’s WriteThat.Name, which works with Gmail and Google Apps, can automatically scan incoming emails for the contact information that’s typically contained in email signatures, and then update the contact database with that information. Read More »

Looking for a way to access your Gmail inbox from your Mac’s menu bar? Zentertain’s Mailbox is a lightweight app that does just that, adding an envelope icon to your menu bar that, when clicked, pops open a window containing your Gmail inbox. Read More »

I’m a huge fan of anything that can make me more productive, so I’m always looking for ways to accomplish more while not killing myself doing it. It’s easier to excel if you can do more than your peers while still having time to recharge. Read More »

Xobni, a popular productivity add-on for Outlook that automatically displays additional information about email contacts, has announced that it is making available “gadgets,” third-party additions to Xobni that will let well-known collaboration tools like Yammer, Chatter and Dropbox become an integral part of the Outlook interface. Read More »

If you’re anything like me, you probably have several email address books, each with a daunting number of duplicate, conflicting and junk entries. Scrubly is an automated online tool that can help clean up Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail address books. Read More »

We’ve probably all had times when we’ve been so busy we didn’t have time to deal with an important email when we we read it. The danger is that it ends up being forgotten. Snooze Your Email for Gmail may be able to help. Read More »

Ever wished you could send email attachments to your Dropbox account just by forwarding them to a special address? With Send to Dropbox, you can do just that. Any emails that you forward to it will be processed and their attachments saved to your Dropbox account Read More »

Simon says that email’s reign may be coming to an end, and I recently mentioned sending less email as one way to reduce email overload, so I thought it would be fun to think about ways that how can replace email with other, more suitable tools. Read More »

Can making email into a game make you more productive, encourage you to develop better habits and make email more fun? That’s the idea behind Baydin’s The Email Game, which applies gameplay mechanics to the process of working through your inbox. Read More »

While it has been widely reported that teens no longer use email, it seems that attitudes to email are changing in workplace, too. According to a new GigaOM Pro report, workers don’t consider that email will continue to be such a critical tool in the future. Read More »

Did you know that you can simply copy and paste images into Gmail messages using Chrome? While drag-and-dropping images messages has been available in Gmail for a while now, being able to paste images from the clipboard is arguably an even more useful feature. Read More »

As part of a raft of small changes to Gmail, the app now has the option to disable its automatic saving of contacts. While many people find the ability find auto-saving useful, for some it ends up creating too much clutter in their contacts list. Read More »

If you need to securely share data like a password, bank account or credit card number, Lockify is an easy way to do so. Once your message has been encrypted, you are given a link that can be sent via email, SMS or Facebook private message. Read More »

As we rely more heavily on a plethora of communications services, the once-practical paper trail is under threat. It’s getting harder for many of us to keep track of conversations. How can teams improve communication trackability, and make the most of the tools they have available? Read More »

A primary source of information overload is our email inboxes. While I’ve previously mentioned a few strategies for dealing with email overload, I think it’s a good time for a post with comprehensive rundown of my tips for managing email. Read More »

Xobni, a popular productivity add-on for Outlook, is finally coming to Gmail and Google Apps. It works via a browser plugin that adds a sidebar to Gmail to help you search and manage your contacts while automatically creating profiles for anyone you’ve ever emailed. Read More »

Plaxo is refocusing its efforts on its address book product, and has announced the availability of the Plaxo Personal Assistant, a new service that can intelligently makes automatic updates to the Plaxo address book to keep contact information relevant and up-to date. Read More »

Gmail’s Smart Labels, which can automatically label many types of “bacn” email, is a great feature and works really well, but if you don’t use Gmail or aren’t comfortable with Google analyzing your emails, there are options for dealing with bacn in desktop email clients: Read More »

Dealing with our overloaded inboxes takes time; anything that makes the email experience more productive has the potential for considerable savings for businesses. NEO Pro 5.0 is an add-on that promises to make the Outlook experience more organized and productive. Read More »

Email spam is, of course, a continuing problem, even if the total amount has fallen recently. So Google has responded by adding some new spam-fighting tools to Google Apps. Administrators can now enable DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). This technology is intended to prevent “spoofing” of messages. Read More »

A recent survey of New Year’s resolutions found that workers are not interested in being out of touch in 2011. Less than one in five workers (19 percent) resolves to unplug from email or voicemail in their time off from work. Read More »

If the rumors are to be believed, Facebook is about to unveil a new email service. It might just be part of the ongoing war between Facebook and Google, but what’s interesting about it is it will show how much potential there is in email still. Read More »

I hate spending time on email. But for those of us who do most of our work online, we can’t escape it. When was the last time you took a hard look at the emails you send to other people? Are your emails helping or hindering? … Read More »

In most companies, a lot of project communication occurs via email. That can cause problems, because issues that are supposedly “flagged” via email often end up getting lost in people’s inboxes; there’s no central place to track them. That’s why Webyog created its new project, … Read More »

n most large organizations, email is the communication tool of choice. It provides a virtual “paper trail,” doesn’t require the recipient to pick up the phone and is accessible in most places. For some organizations, though, that reliance on email can be problematic. Read More »

It sounds great, right? Cut your email replies down to a couple of sentences and everything’s peachy: you’ll plow through that inbox super-fast and be able to get onto the work that you have to do a whole lot sooner. Productivity will soar! Or will it? Read More »

PC Mag’s John C. Dvorak contends that people have stopped responding to their email, and that social networking sites like Facebook aren’t the solution. What would be? Dvorak thinks the salvation of email would be making it a pay service, with fees applied in micro-payment tolls. Read More »

Do you sometimes forget to follow up on important emails, or struggle with adding follow up reminders to your calendar? FollowUp is a useful, free and easy-to-use service that you can use to automatically send yourself a reminder to follow up. Read More »

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