Email is without a doubt the most tried and true technology for both enterprise and personal communication, but it’s not without its shortcomings. Specifically, Atos CEO Thierry Breton cited email’s spam-like nature as one of the biggest contributors to “information  pollution” that’s bogging down management. His goal is for Atos — which has nearly 50,000 employees worldwide — to be a “zero-email company” within the next three years. In place of email, Breton says that Atos will increasingly encourage its employees to collaborate on instant messaging and social networking platforms.

This marks the first time an organization of this size has made such a definitive statement on email, but it almost certainly won’t be the last. In truth, the gradual shift from email to messaging and social networking platforms began some years ago, but it’s only recently that this phenomenon has penetrated the enterprise from the consumer side.

Over the past several years, the rise of social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter have taken a lot of the conversations that once occurred on email to other channels on the consumer side. While email is still a central repository for tracking updates from various networking sites, it has become decidedly less useful for interacting with friends and colleagues on a daily basis compared to mediums like instant messaging and streaming content feeds.

As is often the case, the consumer side embraced these platforms well in advance of the enterprise. Instant messaging, Facebook and Twitter have all been in use for years for personal computing purposes. As the “internet generation” has come of age, entrepreneurs have increasingly put effort behind enterprise-friendly communication and automation tools. The rapid rise of platforms like Yammer and Salesforce’s Chatter - which are exclusively geared towards the enterprise — suggest the larger rise of the “social enterprise.”

The social enterprise refers to a premium on enhanced collaboration and real-time communication in the name of greater organizational efficiency. As such, there’s no single be-all, end-all tool that will ultimately replace email. Rather, a suite of complementary tools are gradually emerging as more effective mediums for enterprise collaboration.

Some other noteworthy technologies that are emerging in place of email include:

• Process automation tools: Automating processes via business process management (BPM) tools enables automated responses and actions via automated emails, instant messages, etc. that prompted actionable messages (I.e., a “yes/no” button). This can eliminate the tedious back-and-forth associated with corporate functions like employee on-boarding/off-boarding, invoicing and employee requests. BPM has seen a spike in interest in recent years, with mega-vendors like Oracle and IBM  putting more effort into their BPM offerings, and smaller vendors like BonitaSoft (my company), Intalio and BizAgi also offering BPM suites.
• Enterprise portals: While enterprise portals have existed for some time, they’ve recently begun integrating more social features to increase collaboration between employees — often via real-time, streaming feeds with more accessible user interfaces. More and more, these portals are including plug-ins for other features like process automation and instant messaging to create a wider social intranet in which employees can collaborate. eXo and Liferay are two examples of enterprise portal vendors that have successfully incorporated a social aspect into their respective offerings.
• Semantic web technologies: This is a still-evolving area that, while it has yet to make a significant mark in the enterprise, is poised to emerge as a critical technology in the near future. As organizations continue to struggle to manage the massive volumes of unstructured data generated by internal communication, it’s important to have tools capable of properly sorting and analyzing the information it generates. Examples of this can be seen today from the likes of Microsoft (Powerset/Bing), Apple (Siri/Apple 4S) and Google (FreeBase), among others.

This is not to say that email is not still a necessary component of enterprise communication; it’s still a vital cog for many core organizational processes. However, with the rise of tools such as those mentioned above, it’s undoubtedly seeing a decline in overall  usage — particularly in terms of internal collaboration. Atos’ decision to phase out email is perhaps the most ringing endorsement yet for the notion that email is being gradually phased out of the enterprise, and it will be interesting to see how many other large scale organizations will follow in its footsteps over the next several years as collaborative technologies continue to evolve.

Miguel Valdés Faura is the CEO and co-founder of BonitaSoft, a France-based company that produces business process management (BPM) software and provides commercial services and support for the open source Bonita project, of which he is also co-founder. Follow Miguel on Twitter @MiguelValdes.

For more information about the future of collaboration tools, check out GigaOM’s Net:Work event on Dec. 8, 2011.

Image courtesy of Flickr user cambodia4kidsorg.

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• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
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Dear Email, this isn’t working out. It’s not you, it’s me.

I definitely have a love/hate relationship with email, but I know that the majority of my issues with it are a result of user error more than a problem with the technology itself.

User problem #1: Elaboration and niceties

At this minute, I have over one hundred emails in my inbox that need an action or response. Any time I get the nerve to tackle them, I think about having to read through paragraphs of explanation and niceties in order to get to the meat of the message so that I can take action.

As a regular sender of emails myself, I’m just as guilty of adding unnecessary elaboration and niceties to my messages as the next person. I feel the need to start with the typical, “How have you been” and “Here’s the latest this way” chitchat, followed by a detailed explanation of why I’m emailing, but as a reader (and someone with 100+ emails to process right now), I’d love to know I could open each one and find a simple and direct message that tells me what the sender needs. “Hi, Amber. I’m emailing to see if . . .” Ah, wishful thinking.

User problem #2: Deceptive and inadequate subject lines

How great would it be if everyone started using more helpful and direct subject lines? Even just adding simple lead-ins like “Quick question” or “Urgent” could help us hone in on those messages that need attention more immediately than others.

User problem #3: Abuse

We all have to pay the price for those who abuse email, like spammers, contacts who automatically subscribe us to their newsletters, and others who use this more personal and private medium for uninvited messages.

User problem #4: Poor filtering

One big mistake I make with my own email usage is not using filters effectively. There are many types of emails (messages from social networks, newsletters, and other notifications) that could easily be marked as read and archived without my ever having to touch them. The only reason they’re not is because I don’t take the time to set up filters to sort them.

User problem #5: Using the wrong medium

Instead of sending five emails back and forth to set a single appointment, it would be more effective to use another service that streamlines appointment-setting, like TimeTrade, Google Calendar, or SkedgeMe. As with this example, a lot of our communications could be cut down or eliminated, if we’d choose a better medium for them.

But what about the technology?

While user error is a big part of the problem, technology is not completely in the clear.

Technology problem #1: Poor spam filtering

Until we get to the point where spam is successfully filtered out each and every time (which, let’s face it, is not likely to happen), email will always be somewhat of a nuisance, no matter how effective we get with our use of it.

Technology problem #2: Inadequate sorting

Some messages are notifications, some are spam, and a tiny portion are actually important enough to warrant our attention more immediately. It would help if these messages were automatically separated somehow.

It would also be helpful to have smart sorting based on people (example, important people, new people, companies). When I can zoom in on emails from clients and important business contacts, I’m much more likely to stay on task and not get distracted, but by the same token, I’d also like to see a filter to sort out new people, which could help with identifying new prospects and opportunities.

Fixing the world’s email problems might be a tall order, but the good news is that developers are listening. Even better, they’re asking us what we want from the applications we use on a daily basis and how we would like to see them improved.

What suggestions do you have for fixing email?

Photo courtesy Flickr user ilamont.com

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• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
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Communication has evolved with technology, but many of those now IMing colleagues cut their teeth writing internal memos on typewriters. Cultural and generational clashes are both common in distributed collaboration, and more damaging than they might be if the working relationships had a face-to-face component.

Many have discussed email etiquette, but for the average web worker, the notion of politesse can seem archaic — or even counterproductive in some circumstances. Here, then, are five golden rules for respectful, productive digital communication, whether you’re using email, IM, video chat, phone, or other communications tools like document sharing and time tracking systems.

1. Have an agenda, and meet it

To keep digital exchanges functional, set an agenda. Whether it’s a one-line email, or a one-hour video conference, your interaction will be more productive if you stay on track. Your colleagues will appreciate it, because it shows respect for their time. And it’ll let you identify any part of the exchange that’s off-topic, and end it — perhaps suggesting an alternative time to address it — before it gets out of hand.

Having an agenda helps cut down on time-wasting, but it also encourages responsiveness, since your collaborators know what you need, and don’t need to wade through the waffle to give it to you.

2. Don’t spam

In this context, spam is any form of unwanted or unnecessary communication. It doesn’t need to involve multiple recipients: leaving your colleague a phone message, then sending a text, and following up with an email, is example of spam. Sharing your new document with a colleague who’s on your team, but doesn’t need to use it, is an example of spam.

Spam overwhelms us. It makes us stressed and cranky, and it makes maintaining focus difficult. Be astute in working out what to share with which team members, and learn to differentiate between information for information’s sake, and necessary communication.

3. Respect time constraints

Having respect for the time constraints of your colleagues governs a range of collaborative behaviors.

Give collaborators time to receive your communication, digest it and formulate a reply around the other work they’re doing before you bug them for their response. Prioritize your communications points so that colleagues know what’s most important, and tell them if something’s urgent. Conversely, don’t earmark a task or communication as urgent if it’s not. As well as indicating the reason for your communication, identify your expectations of a response timeframe, so your colleague can prioritize your request.

Remember: while digital communications tools may seem immediate, we’re only human, and none of us can be in two places at once.

4. Be clear

Clarity and directness underpin digital collaboration. But, particularly in written or very short communications, choose your words carefully. Short can very easily come across as terse. Speak in a way that’s appropriate to your colleague, and your relationship with them, as well as the communications medium your using.

Choosing the right tool for the job can influence your ability to communicate what’s needed. Limits on length, or attachments and other inclusions, can hobble communications, so make sure you choose the medium that suits your needs best. Don’t try to wedge a phone conversation into a voicemail, for example — your garbled, rushed message will just add to the “noise” to your colleague’s day. Instead, just explain why you’re calling and ask them to call you back. Explain the details in person when they do.

Being clear is particularly important in shared, multi-party systems like document sharing and contact management systems. Stick to the guidelines your team has set for aspects like naming and storage conventions — it’ll reduce confusion and communications noise, and generally make life easier for your colleagues.

5. Be open

Digital workers can end up hiding behind a smokescreen of task managers, email autoresponders, and voicemail all too easily if they feel overwhelmed. Lead by example. If you’re asking a team member for something, be available to answer their questions about your request. Be diligent about responding to colleagues in an appropriate way using the foundations outlined here.

Accept that good digital collaboration takes time and mutual understanding — it is, after all, communication between people. Relegating a colleague whose communications approach annoys you to the back of the queue is rarely productive; the best way to encourage others to collaborate with you in the way you want is to take the time to explain your preferences to them.

That conversation could eradicate the kind of uncertainty that undermines good distributed working relationships, and cement the foundations for ongoing productive collaboration.

Image courtesy stock.xchng user JR3.

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The key to remaining productive is to not let distractions 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.

1. Social media. Turn it off when you need to focus. Seriously. Shut down your Twitter client and log out of Facebook and other services for at least part of the day when you really need to focus on your work. If you can’t turn them off, you can still disable notifications so that you aren’t having them pop into view constantly. This doesn’t mean that you can’t check social media while you work, but you can minimize the impact by only checking in periodically. Maybe you look at Twitter and Facebook once per hour, or when you finish one task and are moving to the next. But really, if you are checking Twitter every few minutes, are you really going to get as much work done as you would if you weren’t checking it?
2. Visitors. Whether you work in an office or at home, people will drop in and distract you. I’ll admit it, I often listen to music or put my headphones in just to signal to people that I am not available. If people see that you have headphones in, they will at least think twice about bothering you. Leaving your phone headset on can also work. You might try “do not disturb” signs or shutting your office door, if you are lucky enough to have one. I’ve even had pretty good luck with hiding and working in a super secret location until I finished a piece of work that needed focused concentration.
3. Unnecessary or unproductive meetings. I’m a big fan of not attending meetings that aren’t valuable in some way. Now, this probably doesn’t mean that you can blow off your manager’s staff meeting or important meetings with clients, but you can probably skip a few meetings. I’ll often look at the agenda for a meeting, and if there isn’t anything particularly relevant for me, I’ll send the organizer an email to let them know that I won’t be attending. On the flip side, you should be considerate when scheduling your own meetings. Cancel them if you don’t have anything important for the meeting, and always send an agenda in advance to let people know whether or not they need to attend.
4. Email. Most of us get more email than what we can possibly read anyway, and it just keeps coming in! You could probably spend all day just responding to email, but then you would never get any work done. The first thing to do is turn off any pop-up notifications that you get every time someone sends you an email. Next, set up some filters and color code email from important people to help you notice the ones you care about while ignoring the rest. Now, the hard part. You have to actually ignore your email and focus on other work without that distraction. You can occasionally glance at your email on a regular schedule or between tasks and look for anything critical. If it’s not critical, ignore it for a bit until you are ready to spend a little chunk of time focused on doing email.
5. Instant messages. For really serious work, you might think about logging completely out of your instant messaging client. For most of us, we can use custom status messages to signal to people how urgent their request should be before they interrupt you. I recently set my status to “cranky, interrupt at your own risk”, and I don’t think I had a single IM during that time. I also use the generic, “busy – priority interrupts only” status, and you can get pretty creative with these to let people know that they really should think twice about interrupting. It is also perfectly acceptable to not respond immediately to an IM. If a friend or co-worker sends you a message on a topic that isn’t going to be critical, ignore it until you get to a good stopping point or when you are ready to take a break and respond when it makes sense for you.

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• Social Inbox vs. The Future of Email
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If you’re used a mailing list app before, the concept will be familiar. You can create a mailing list (called a “loop”) through the web interface; it can be designated as being for a team (only open to people you invite), for an organization (open to anyone from your company, based on their email address, and anyone you invite), or public (open to anyone). You can also specify whether anyone can post to the loop, or just yourself. You then give your loop a name, which forms its email address (so you could have gigaom@ccloop.com, for example), and invite members. People can then post messages to the loop by sending emails to its address and will receive messages that others send to the list.

Once your loops are set up, you can primarily work with them through your email client, although you can also view and search the messages and files that have been sent to each loop through the web interface. The web interface also offers facilities to manage your loops and adjust editing settings like who can post to each loop, and you can specify whether you receive every email from each loop, get a daily digest or only access the loop via the web interface. Additionally, you can use the web interface to follow loops that others have created, and share loops with others.

Realistically, ccLoop isn’t going to solve the email overload problem on its own, but it does offer a useful way for organizations to structure and archive email conversations — discussing projects or sending out company-wide updates, for example — and for individuals to determine how they receive the messages from those conversations. It isn’t really doing anything new, as it’s effectively just a slightly more modern take on the kind of mailing list functionality offered by the likes of Google Groups and Yahoo Groups. However, those apps have clunky interfaces; ccLoop makes setting up and managing mailing lists a breeze. The app is currently in beta and is free; premium features will likely be introduced at some point.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Getting started with Shortmail is simple; you need to sign in with your Twitter account, which then forms your Shortmail email address (my Twitter handle is spiky_simon, so my Shortmail address is spiky_simon <at> shortmail.com, for example) Once signed in, you’ll be taken to your inbox. The Shortmail web interface is pretty easy to use, but the service works with POP3 and IMAP so you can also use it with your regular email client.

Any outgoing messages sent from your Shortmail account have a footer attached that says “This is Shortmail. Please reply in less than 500 characters; about 5 sentences.” Anyone trying to reply with a message that’s longer than 500 characters will be sent an email telling them that their email is too long with a link that allows them to edit their email to get it under the limit.

Apart from limiting the length of emails, Shortmail also has the ability to make conversations public. Prior to sending an email you can check the “Public” checkbox; the email and any replies will then become available online, complete with a Twitter-friendly short URL so you can share the conversation with others (Shortmail warns the people you email that the conversation will be posted online). This public conversations feature could be useful for sharing discussions with your team, for example.

Shortmail certainly works to keep emails snappy, but while I’d love to find a service that reduces my email overload, I’m not convinced that Shortmail’s approach is the right answer for me. While shorter, more concise emails obviously take less time to process, I find it’s the volume of emails that I receive that causes most of my email overload, not each email’s length. If, as noted in this Shortmail blog post, 99 percent of business communications already fits within the 500 character limit, is there much of a reason to use it? I think it’s likely that Shortmail will annoy people on those occasions when they do need to send me a longer message; spending time editing an email or splitting it up to meet the limit would be pretty time-consuming. Also, any incoming attachments are simply stripped from the message with no warning to the sender, which I think could lead to miscommunication (“Did you see the doc I sent you last week?”).

What do you think? Could Shortmail’s character limits solve email overload problem?

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Specifically, Striebeck is asking for help with three questions:

• What email features would make it easier to interact with Google+?
• How could Google integrate Google+ features into Gmail?
• How can Google integrate social concepts in Gmail to make the email experience itself better?

If you’d like to provide your input, you can either join in a brainstorming discussion using Google+’s built-in video chat tool, Hangouts, on Tuesday, July 12 at 3pm PDT (although given the number of comments on Streibeck’s post already, I think it may be pretty popular and difficult to get into), or leave your thoughts in a shared Google Doc (you’ll need to ask Streibeck for access).

It will be interesting to see whether Striebeck can use Google’s own tools (Google+, Hangouts and Docs) to successfully gather the community feedback he’s looking for here, particularly as Hangouts is limited to ten simultaneous connections. But it does demonstrate that Google+ can be used as a collaboration tool, and underscores how Google+ may yet find a home in the workplace.

Personally, I’d like to see email notifications in Google+, and also to use profile information from my Circles to populate my address book in Gmail. What social features from Google+ would you like to see added to Gmail?

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
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Today, I stumbled across a new prospect for email management, SaneBox, which can automatically prioritize and sort email. Could this new hopeful mean the end of email insanity, as it claims? Time will tell, but it looks very promising.

Works with all providers

SaneBox works with most email services that use IMAP or WebDAV, including Gmail, Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Mail, and Mozilla Thunderbird, so you can keep your current email address and software. It works within your current email program by accessing your account and adding unique folders for sorting.

Better layout than Priority Inbox

SaneBox seems to work a lot like Priority Inbox, except that sorting takes place using folders instead of using a multi-section layout, which I think makes it easier to compartmentalize and maintain focus. With Priority Inbox, you see all messages in the same pane, making it tempting to jump around or check out less important emails. With SaneBox, you view one folder at a time, and other messages are displayed as a count within your sidebar.

Smart, easy sorting

When you sign up for an account, SaneBox takes your most recent 5,000 messages and sorts them. All other messages are sent to the archive. The most recent emails are then sorted, based on importance, to either your inbox or to a “SaneLater” folder. As you go through your messages, you can drag and drop messages that you’d like to process later into folders such as “SaneTomorrow” or “SaneNextWeek.”  They’ll automatically be moved back to your inbox at the appropriate time.

Simple tweaks and adjustments

SaneBox learns from your actions. You can sort mislabeled messages into the folders where you would like them to go, so for instance, if you get mailing list emails, you can have them sent to your “SaneLater” folder instead of your inbox, or you can send them to the “SaneBlackHole,” if you would prefer not to see them at all.

This functionality works in reverse, too, so if you see that an important message got sent to the “SaneLater” folder by mistake, you can drag it to the inbox so that it gets a higher priority with future sorting.

SaneBox refers to these adjustments as “trainings,” which you can access and adjust within your control panel at any time. (Side note: Afraid you got a little trigger happy? Go to the “trained contacts” section of your account and remove any rules you’ve set so that emails are filtered based on the original settings.)

Added features to improve workflow

The main sorting capabilities of SaneBox make it worth a look, but there are several added features that help to improve workflow and email management, including:

• Social network refinement, which helps to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of sorting, based on the strength of relationships and connections within social networking platforms.
• Spam folder monitoring that acts more like a temporary black hole, rather than a permanent one like other email programs.
• Multi-level email importance, which allows you to organize emails into five levels to maximize your workflow.
• Encryption and “outside-the-envelope” examination of messages (SaneBox does not read your email) so that sensitive information remains protected and private.

A monthly subscription costs $4.95 and the app comes with a 30-day trial.

What tools and tricks do you use for managing email overload?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Evil Erin

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Unlike Gmail’s forgotten attachment reminder, CodeTwo’s plugin is user-configurable. You can add to or modify the list of keywords it looks for, alter the text of the alert, and you can also opt to have the application scan the email body, subject line or both (the default). Handily, Outlook Attachment Reminder only scans material you write, so if you compose a reply and the quoted original message includes one or more of the keywords the program looks for, it won’t trigger an alert.

Outlook Attachment Reminder is freeware and can be downloaded from the CodeTwo website.

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• Social Inbox vs. The Future of Email
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Email has transformed the way people shop, bank, communicate with family members and do business. Now an essential tool for approximately one billion mobile workers across the globe, email continues to dominate the way in which we communicate.

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? With web workers now using more sophisticated collaborative apps and social business tools to communicate and share information, are we going to see email’s reign come to an end?

Email is a great communication tool. You can get in touch with business colleagues, family and friends at the touch of a button. Gone are the days of waiting by the front door for a letter from uncles and aunties across the globe, or sitting by a fax machine waiting for that signed document to come back from a client’s legal team. However, email isn’t a collaboration tool. Anyone who has tried to collate feedback from numerous colleagues on a document over email knows how painful the process can be. No one seems to remember which version the team is working on and there is always that one person who sends over some (supposedly) final amendments overnight. Hours can be wasted waiting for emails to go back and forth, searching through inboxes for missing documents, and putting large files onto CDs, USB sticks or FTP servers due to file size restrictions.

It is little wonder then that web workers across the globe are turning to the likes of Dropbox for storing and sharing files. Store your files on one computer, and they’ll automatically appear on your other computers with Dropbox installed. Simple. Indeed, Apple has finally joined the party and realized that emailing photos from your phone was so 2010 — its forthcoming iCloud service will provide a far smarter way to move your content between devices. Evernote is another popular tool with remote workers, enabling you to quickly capture anything. Whether it’s a photo, a screenshot or a web site, whatever you capture is stored, processed and made searchable. And, of course, there’s Huddle. Being cloud-based, Huddle enables you to manage your projects, files and people on any device, from any location.

With social networks making it so easy to stay in touch and share information with people in their personal lives, the demand for such simplicity in the workplace has increased. Take Facebook, for example: You can message your friends, share your photos and videos (and every other aspect of your life should you so wish), and co-ordinate events from wherever you are. With more than 500 million active Facebook users spending 700 billion minutes per month on the site, and more than 200 million people tweeting, email’s grip on our personal lives may well be coming to an end.

For business, however, it’s a different matter. Yes, there are tools being used to make our working lives easier, but removing email from the workplace completely will require more than just introducing intuitive, easy-to-use tools in the office. It requires a change in habit. Email is deeply entrenched in our daily working lives and moving to other tools will require a culture shift. Any new tools and services need to be integrated into processes from the outset of a project / program / campaign so that people become accustomed to using an alternative tool. And this is before you start the mammoth task of introducing client and partner companies to your amazing new tool. While email may not dominate workplace communication in another 40 years, there’s life in it yet!

Andy McLoughlin, Co-founder and EVP Strategy at Huddle, can be reached on Twitter @Bandrew.

Photo courtesy Flickr user ilamont.com.

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Here’s Anderson’s suggested list of common-sense email rules:

1. Respect recipients’ time
2. Be easy to process
3. Choose clear subject lines.
4. Short does not mean rude!
5. Slow does not mean uncaring!
6. Abhor open-ended questions
7. Cut gratuitous responses
8. Think before you cc:
9. Speak softly
10. Attack attachments
11. Make it easy to unsubscribe
12. Think about the thread
13. Don’t reply when angry
14. Use NNTR
15. Pay a voluntary email tax
16. Switch off the computer!

You can get more detail about each of the suggested rules over on Anderson’s blog. He is currently collecting feedback on these rules and looking for other suggestions, and is planning on eventually publishing the charter at a URL he’s reserved here.

Anderson’s efforts to stimulate some debate around email etiquette with a community-created email charter is laudable, but while I agree with the most of the suggested rules presented (with the exception of a voluntary email tax), I question whether publishing it will actually make very much difference to the daily deluge of email we have to deal with. Most people have been using email for an awfully long time, and their habits are very entrenched; getting them to change them is likely to prove a very difficult task, especially as most of these rules only directly benefit an email’s recipients. The people who care about email and its effects on productivity will probably already be following most of these rules already, while people who don’t care about etiquette will likely not be interested in finding, reading and implementing what is a fairly lengthy list of rules. One possible way to educate people about these rules and force them to use them would be to incorporate them into the popular email clients, but I can’t imagine that an email client that nagged its users into improving their email habits would be very popular, as anyone who remembers the much-derided Clippy feature in Microsoft Office will attest. Nevertheless, for people who do care about effective email usage, having a comprehensive guide to etiquette will be useful, so I am looking forward to seeing the end product.

What do you think? Is an email charter a good idea, and could it change people’s habits?

Hat tip to reader Andy Jacobson for notifying us of this effort.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Muffet

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While I think Joel’s advice is useful, I’d go further and say that if you really want people to pay attention to your email ground rules, you should put them in the body of the email itself rather than in your signature, possibly as the last line of the email before your sign-off – people often don’t bother reading email signatures, particularly if they are lengthy. If the email you’re sending doesn’t  require a response, you could also add wording to the subject line (such as “FYI” or “For Information Only”) to make it even clearer. It’s also important to try to cut down on the number of unnecessarily open-ended questions you pose in group emails (“what time should we meet?” for example), as that’s much more likely to result in back-and-forth reply-all responses, again increasing the volume of email that everyone has to deal with.

While it may take a few extra seconds to formulate and type out that includes explicit instructions, you’ll be saving the time of everyone copied on the email, and over time you may actually end up educating a few colleagues on better email usage.

Looking for some more information on how to improve email efficiency? Dawn shared her favorite tips for reducing email overload recently.

Share your tips for reducing email overload below.

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Tout’s email templating feature doesn’t really do much that you couldn’t also achieve with Gmail’s Canned Responses feature, , although it does include basic mail merge features to automatically personalize each email, and handily templates can include file attachments. Where Tout gets really interesting, however, is in its analytics, which enables a user to track how successful each email and each template is. Users can see which emails have been opened and whether the recipient has clicked a link within  the email. These stats could be useful when refining a pitch, but could also be potentially useful in other scenarios, too; a manager could use Tout to track emails sent the team and use it to optimize his or her communications. (Note: Tout tracks whether an email has been opened by inserting an invisible image into the message; this is not a particularly reliable tracking method, as many email clients don’t download images by default. The click metrics are obtained by redirecting links and should be much more reliable.). Teams can share templates, and Tout integrates with several CRM applications: Highrise, Capsule CRM and Batchbook. The service also caters to users who spend time outside of the office, with a mobile-optimized version of the website and a “send by SMS” that allows users to quickly send templated emails via text message.

The company has recently obtained a round of seed funding and will be participating in Dave McClure’s 500 Startups program this summer.  I spoke with founder Tawheed Kader about the product and its future, and he said that while the app was originally designed with sales and marketing in mind (hence its name), it’s also useful in any situation where repetitive emails are sent, such as job and apartment searches. Kader has ambitious plans for the product, and sees it being “the future of business email,” with the app used throughout an organization to improve email effectiveness, incorporating group discussion and introduction features, a “template store” and other tools. Whether the company is able to transition the app from being primarily a sales and marketing tool into a more general purpose application remains to be seen, but it’s certainly a useful service for anyone looking to track and optimize their email.

Tout’s available on several plans, depending on the number of emails to be sent and features required. There’s also a limited free plan, which enables user to send seven emails per day and doesn’t have access to some features. A team plan that enables sharing of templates is available for $99 per month. All plans come with a 30-day money back guarantee.

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Here are a few of the rules, filters and email groupings that I use to sort my email and process my inbox more efficiently:

1. Status reports. I use a rule that automatically places anything that contains “monthly status report” or “MSR” anywhere in the subject line into a “status reports” smart folder, without removing it from my inbox. At the end of the month, when the status reports are flooding in, I can click on my folder and pick out the few that I need to read while filing the rest away in my archive to quickly get them out of my inbox.
2. High volume subjects. For any topic that is generating a lot of email, such as a project that’s about to be completed, I’ll often create a temporary smart mailbox that uses keywords to find those high volume subjects. I can then easily scan through all the emails on that particular topic and better see the threads that are being discussed all together in one place. Turning threaded discussions on for those folders is a good way to see entire conversations in order to decide whether or not I need to add anything to the discussion.
3. Twitter messages. To reduce distraction, Twitter messages automatically get dumped into a separate folder without ever hitting my inbox. I can just take a quick look at this folder occasionally to see if there is anything interesting or anyone that I want to follow back.
4. Services. I also create folders to group mail from bug trackers, mailing lists, etc. These go to individual folders without skipping my inbox, which helps me to get through the first wave of email in the morning, because I can process all the email from each service that came in overnight. During the day, I can see the new emails popping into the inbox and decide whether they need to be dealt with immediately or processed later.
5. People. I keep a list of the people who work for me and make sure that their emails appear both in my inbox and in a smart folder. This is really important when I am pressed for time and can’t get through my email, because it allows me to at least glance at the email from my employees to see if anyone urgently needs something from me.
6. Unimportant. I also have a bunch of filters that take things like press releases from random PR people and dump them immediately to reduce the clutter in my inbox.

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After a user has authorized GrexIt to access Google Apps, moving conversations into GrexIt is simply a matter of forwarding emails to the “add@grexit.com,” or if the user has the GrexIt browser extension installed (currently available for Chrome and Firefox, with Safari support on the way), hitting the “Add to GrexIt” button. Once conversations have been moved to GrexIt, they become available to everyone on the company domain. Users can also apply shared GrexIt labels (which work similarly to, but are separate from, Gmail labels) to conversations to make them easier to find later. Users with the browser extension can also search the repository from their Gmail sidebar.

GrexIt also has a couple of additional advanced features that make it a more useful enterprise tool. Firstly, admins can specify can specify “Fetch rules” that automatically pull certain emails into GrexIt. For example, a Fetch Rule could specify that all of the emails in a user’s inbox with the label “Invoices” are automatically moved into GrexIt (note that users are asked for their permission before any Fetch rules are applied). Admins can also set up “Access Rules” and restrict access to discussions with certain GrexIt labels to particular users, or groups of users.

Unfortunately, emails aren’t often written with the intention of being stored in a knowledge base for later recall, which may make the signal-to-noise ratio of the GrexIt repository pretty low, and specific information difficult to find. I can imagine that in a larger company the volume of material stored could potentially become difficult to manage. However, it’s still better than having no shared access to that information at all. While the signal-to-noise ratio in a GrexIt repository may be lower than on, say, a shared wiki, adding information to GrexIt is much easier than having to write out wiki content, so it’s more likely to be used by everyone in a company.

GrexIt is currently in private beta and free; you can request an invite at the website. When it’s released, it will be sold on the Google Apps Marketplace, likely for somewhere between $1 per user per month to $5 per user per month, according to co-founder Niraj Ranjan Rout. It currently only supports Google Apps, although Rout says that support for other email platforms is on the way. Note that the Firefox extension does not yet support Firefox 5 beta.

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A total of 71 percent of those responding to the survey said that they are OK with being interrupted while on their summer vacations. That percentage included:

• 32 percent who said that email is the best way to reach them,
• 20 percent preferred to be contacted by phone, and
• 18 percent preferred text messages.

Interestingly, of the 29 percent who said it is never appropriate to contact them while on vacation, more than 7 out of 10 are over the age of 45.

Eighty-seven percent of those responding to the survey also preferred email for communicating with coworkers and business contacts while in the office. Of those responding, 31 percent said that voicemail is their least favorite mode of communication, followed by instant messaging (29 percent), and texting (26 percent).

The survey was conducted online from May 12-16, 2011 among 2,398 U.S. adults. Respondents were full- and part-time employed adults in the U.S. who have colleagues.

How accessible will you be on your next vacation?

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