GigaOM » Collaboration

Google kills Gmail app for BlackBerry

Om Malik — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:28:22 +0000

I understand BlackBerry is not a top priority for Google or one of the other major software vendors, but to kill off a decent app that many of us BlackBerry owners used is just wrong.

Beginning November 22, 2011, we will end support for the Gmail App for BlackBerry (installed native app). Over this past year, we’ve focused efforts on building a great Gmail experience in the mobile browser and will continue investing in this area. Users may continue to use the app, if installed, however it will not be supported by Google, or available for download starting November 22.

I am guessing they want us to use the “exchange” equivalent for logging into Google Mail for Business, but for me, it was a great way to use personal Gmail account in an easy and efficient manner. Others too are lamenting Google’s move.

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GoFileDrop now works with Gmail accounts

Simon Mackie — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 17:10:24 +0000

GoFileDrop (previously called GoDropBox) is an app that adds a public mailbox to your Google Docs account, enabling anyone with the appropriate link to upload files to your account. It was previously only available to Google Apps customers via the Google Apps marketplace, but it can now be installed by users with regular Gmail accounts.

To install it, just head to the GoFileDrop site and hit the button to add the service to your Gmail account. It works in the same way as the version available for Google Apps users: Once you’ve authorized GoFileDrop to access your account, you’ll be given a unique URL that you can then forward to other people, which allows them to upload files to your Google Docs account through their browser (they can only upload files and don’t have the ability to read or otherwise access your account). The upload page is shown in the screenshot above. It is easy to use and supports drag and drop, allows batch file uploads and file deletion, and shows upload progress. Uploaded files appear immediately in your Google Docs account, and you’re also sent an email notification of any new uploads.

50 MB of data allowance is provided free. Additional data costs £1.75 ($2.86) per GB, with bulk purchase discounts.

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What mobile apps are essential for collaboration on the go?

Simon Mackie — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:50:10 +0000

With a growing proportion of the workforce already being highly mobile, coupled with an increasing number of workers are expecting to bring their own devices to work, it’s clear that picking the right collaboration apps to keep workers productive while on the go is vital to business success. But what apps do mobile workers need to get their jobs done? A new Forrester report, Mobilize Your Collaboration Strategy, has identified eight “must have” categories of mobile collaboration apps. Here’s a run-down of all the categories outlined, together with some of GigaOM’s recommendations for apps to use in each category:

Email and calendars. Email is, unsurprisingly, still the most important mobile app. According to Forrester, 87 percent of smartphone workers use email on their devices (which leaves me wondering what other 13 percent use their smartphones for), and collectively, they do 32 percent of their email on a smartphone. While most smartphones come with their own email and calendaring tools most users will use, there are some third-party options worth considering:

Gmail and Google Calendar. If you use Gmail, it’s worth noting that the mobile-optimized versions of the Gmail and Google Calendar sites are pretty good. They are fast and have a great UI, and one of the advantages of using them is that you can seamlessly switch from device to device without having to set up IMAP details in your various devices’ email clients.
Touchdown. Brings superb Microsoft Exchange support to Android devices.

Document-based collaboration. Mobile workers need to be able to access their documents while out of the office on any of their devices. Cloud-based document collaboration tools need to include mobile access to be truly effective.

Documents to Go. Dataviz’s Documents to Go is a popular mobile document editing app. It’s available for a variety of platforms, including iOS, BlackBerry, Android and Palm. When combined with a cloud file sync service like Dropbox or box.net, it enables users to access and edit their documents no matter where they are.
Soonr. Soonr is a cloud-based document sync service. However, it also offers integrated MS Office document editing capabilities , which means users don’t need to use a separate app like Documents to Go.

Web conferencing. According to Forrester, 18 percent of information workers and 34 percent of senior staff use web conferencing at least weekly. Mobile access means being able to attend meetings even while away from the laptop.

Fuze Meeting. Fuze Meeting’s impressive service is accessible with mobile devices. Its new Telepresence Connect service can extend traditional room-based telepresence to iPads and Android tablets.
Join.me. LogMeIn’s simple and easy-to-use web conferencing app is accessible through iOS and Android apps.

Activity streams. Forrester thinks activity streams are becoming a critical resource for organizations that work collectively: sales teams, project teams, and executive staff, for example. Mobile support is crucial as it enables workers to stay updated no matter where they are.

Yammer. Yammer is a popular enterprise social networking tool very much like a private Facebook for the enterprise. It offers mobile support though mobile apps available for a variety of platforms.
Socialtext. Socialtext is another enterprise social networking and collaboration app that offers activity streams. It offers mobile support via an optimized version of the website.

Presence and chat. Knowing whether a colleague is available or not is a killer feature when out of the office. While this category of app lags today, Forrester expects adoption to accelerate. These types of features are often also often included in other mobile collaboration tools.

eBuddy. A multi-protocol mobile chat app that supports AIM , ICQ, Google Talk, Yahoo! and MSN Windows Live Messenger within a single interface. It’s available via a native client for Android and iPhone and there’s also a mobile-optimized website.
IM+. Another popular “all-on one” IM app that supports a variety of protocols, including AIM, iChat, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo, ICQ, Jabber, Google Talk, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and Skype Chat, and works on a number of different mobile platforms.

Social collaboration. In this category, Forrester includes access to internal blogs, wikis, community sites, and social networks from a tablet or smartphone. Mobile access allows every professional will remain connected and part of the collaborative process.

IBM Lotus Connections. IBM’s social suite is supported on a range of mobile platforms, including Android, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry and Nokia.
Jive Software. Jive Software’s enterprise social suite provides mobile access though apps for iPhone and BlackBerry.

Expertise location. Forrester says this type of application is on the rise as firms look for ways to make mobile employees productive by helping them identify experts from anywhere. This type of app brings together presence, notifications, social profiles and data from HR. Many social business tools provide this kind of functionality, including:

Video conferencing. Skype has some 170 million active monthly users, and 39 percent of those people use Skype for work. Web conferencing vendors are also adding video to their products. Due to heavy resource requirements, there are few multi-party mobile video conferencing apps, though.

Skype. Skype provides video calling for mobile platforms including iPhone and Android.
Fring. One of the first apps to bring four-way video calls to the iPad, Fring provides native mobile apps for a variety of platforms, and also has mobile browser access.

Personally, I’m not convinced expertise location is really a “must-have” category of mobile collaboration app just yet. Do you agree with Forrester’s categories of “must-have” apps, and which apps do you recommend for each category?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Yagan Kiely

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Google looking to integrate Google+ features into Gmail

Simon Mackie — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 14:47:08 +0000

It should come as 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. According to a Google+ post, Mark Streibeck, Engineering Manager for Gmail frontend, is looking for community input on how Google can successfully integrate the two apps.

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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Take Control of Your Inbox: 9 Ways to Sort Email

Dawn Foster — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 12:03:37 +0000

I make extensive use of smart folders (in Apple Mail) and tags (in Gmail) to sort my email into logical groups that I can easily process all at once; it’s an important part of my strategy for processing my inbox faster and dealing with email overload. The key is to use rules and filters that automatically sort my email without any additional intervention from me.

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

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

I also like to automatically color-code my email using rules, which allows me to see at a glance email that is likely to be important in some way:

Important people. I use a rule to color-code emails from my boss, my boss’s boss, employees and people in other critical roles as orange. Whenever I see something orange pop into my inbox, I know that I need to at least take a quick look at it, because it is more likely to be important than most other types of email.
Critical notices. Things like spam reports that I know need to be dealt with immediately get set to red. Anytime I see something red in my inbox, it requires some kind of immediate action on my part.
Projects and topics. I have other colors that I use to keep track of important projects and topics. For example, as a community manager, I subscribe to all the mailing lists for my project. I need to pay a little more attention to the community mailing list, though, so I set those emails to blue to make sure they stand out.

Image used courtesy of Flickr user RambugMediaImages

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Build a Shared Knowledge Base from Your Inbox With GrexIt

Simon Mackie — Tue, 31 May 2011 21:03:13 +0000

One of the problems with conducting so much work communication via email is that a lot of useful conversation, information and knowledge ends up being locked away inside people’s inboxes, unavailable to the rest of the company. Even worse, if a person then leaves the company, that information may be lost forever. That’s the problem GrexIt is trying to solve with its new app, which is essentially a company-wide knowledge base for Google Apps that allows users to move specified discussions from their inboxes into a shared, searchable repository.

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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The Case for Increased M&A in 2011: Actions and Outlooks

WriteThat.Name Keeps Your Gmail Contacts Up-to-Date

Simon Mackie — Wed, 11 May 2011 19:02:04 +0000

Keeping an email address book up-to-date is a fairly labor-intensive task, which is why we’ve seen the launch of a number of products that attempt to automate the process, such as Xobni, Plaxo’s Personal Assistant and Gist. An app joining this crowded market is Kwaga’s WriteThat.Name, which works with Gmail and Google Apps, automatically scanning incoming emails for the contact information that’s typically contained in email signatures, and then updating the contact database with that information.

Setting it up is straightforward: Authorize the app to work with your Gmail/Google Apps account, and elect to either have your contact details updated automatically or manually. WriteThat.Name will then scan incoming emails looking for contact information (note: it only works for emails received after the point of signing up, it doesn’t scan through your existing inbox). If you choose the manual option, you’ll get a daily email asking you to confirm contact updates before adding them to the address book, as shown in the screenshot above. You can click “Update” to accept the new details, or “Check” to compare the updated entry against the existing one, with the option to edit the entry after accepting the changes:

Choosing the manual option is probably the more sensible way to go until you feel comfortable that the app won’t make any serious errors, but it’s worth noting that WriteThat.Name says it will never delete any contact information, and also that Gmail has an option to restore your contacts database to any point in time up to a week previously, so any mix-ups could be easily corrected. The app works pretty well, judging by my limited testing, with no errors so far. It’s worth pointing out that contacts are only updated once per day (so you only get one daily email if you choose the manual option), and the app will only update existing contacts; it doesn’t create new ones. Of course, in order to work, WriteThat.Name needs full access to your incoming emails, which may be a concern. Kwaga has a comprehensive privacy policy and says it doesn’t store email contents.

WriteThat.Name costs $3 per month, or $20 per year, per Gmail/Google Apps account; the first month is free. That’s cheaper than Plaxo’s Personal Assistant tool, which costs around $7 per month, but then Kwaga’s app will only update the address book with information that’s contained in the emails your receive. Unlike many “social CRM”-type apps that we’ve covered, such as Gist and Plaxo Personal Assistant, WriteThat.Name doesn’t attempt to tie email addresses to data from publicly available data sources, like directories and social networks. WriteThat.Name is perhaps more similar to tools such as gwabbit and Copy2Contact, Windows apps that can automatically extract contact information from Outlook emails. Personally, I’m left wondering how useful WriteThat.Name’s approach will be compared to some of its social CRM competition; many of the people who email me nowadays have pretty sparse (or even non-existent) email signatures.

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How Amazon’s Cloud Failure Could Affect Consumer Behavior

Mailbox Adds Gmail to Your Mac’s Menu Bar

Simon Mackie — Mon, 09 May 2011 19:02:17 +0000

Looking for a way to access your Gmail acount 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. You can read emails, reply to conversations and compose new emails from within that window, all without having to open up your browser.

The first time you click the icon, you’ll be asked for your login details before being taken to your inbox. Eagle-eyed users of the mobile-optimized version of Gmail for the iPhone will probably be very familiar with the version of the web app that pops up; it looks like Mailbox is effectively just a browser window, and the app is tricking Google into thinking that it is serving the site to a mobile device. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: the iPhone-optimized version of Gmail is nicely-designed, provides access to Gmail’s more advanced features (Priority Inbox, Google Buzz, labels, stars, etc.) and works well on smaller displays — like the window that Mailbox uses to display your inbox on your desktop.

As a very simple, lightweight app that provides speedy desktop access to your Gmail account via your menu bar, it works pretty well. However, if you’re a Google Apps for Domains Gmail user, you’re out of luck: unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work properly with those accounts. Additionally, there are a couple of extra (albeit probably technically hard to implement) features that would turn it from merely being a convenient way to access the Gmail website into a much more useful application. Robust offline access would be really handy, and make the app more of an equivalent to full-featured desktop email clients like Outlook and Apple Mail. Some kind of notifications system for new and unread emails would also be useful — perhaps having a count of unread emails next to the app’s icon in the menu bar, and also having the option of Growl notifications for new emails.

Mailbox can be downloaded from the App Store. It’s free, and requires Mac OS X 10.6 or later

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The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

15 Tips for Accomplishing More in Less Time

Dawn Foster — Fri, 06 May 2011 17:03:20 +0000

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 relax and recharge.

Here are my tips for getting more done in less time:

Stay focused on the important work. Keep your eye on the work that will have the biggest impact, and make sure you finish the most important work first. Don’t get caught up in tasks, even those that seem urgent, if they aren’t really important.
Learn keyboard shortcuts. The more you can do without taking your fingers off of the keyboard, the faster you’ll finish your work, so take the time to learn available keyboard shortcuts for commonly-used tasks. Email, RSS readers, browsers and any other frequently-used apps are good places to start. Keyboard shortcuts aren’t only available in desktop apps; many web apps, such as Google Reader and Gmail, also have keyboard shortcuts.
Know whom to ask for help. If you can spend less time trying to figure things out for yourself, you can get more done. Make connections with people in your company and your industry you can ask for help. However, you’ll need to be prepared to help others, too.
Filter anything you can. If you get really good at automatically filtering out the noise, you can focus only on what you really need to see. Set up filters wherever possible: in your email, RSS reader and more.
Learn to skim. If you get good at skimming over content without reading every word, you can quickly determine which items require your attention and which ones can be ignored. This works for reading social network posts, news and email.
Touch once. This one is hard for me to stick with, but when I do it, it really makes a difference. For email or other communications, look over it and decide what to do with it right away: archive, respond, create a task item, flag for followup, etc. Regardless of how you process communications, just make sure you deal with them once rather than looking at them multiple times.
Take control of your calendar. I’m really proactive about my calendar, and I only attend meetings where there is some benefit from my attendance. If you want to have time to get any real work done, you’ll probably need to occasionally decline meetings.
Become the master of your email. Don’t let email control you. Finding ways to reduce email overload and proactively deal with email will allow you to spend less time on email and more time on actual work.
Work in chunks and focus. Despite what some might think, humans are not great at multitasking. We work better when we focus on one thing at a time. I do this by breaking my work up into logical chunks where I can focus on specific tasks.
Get really good at using search engines. Learn little tricks for your favorite search engine. For example, with Google, you could search for “productivity site:gigaom.com/collaboration” to find all of the productivity tips posted on this blog. Spending less time looking for information means that you can get more done.
Automate routine tasks. For any mundane tasks that you perform manually over and over, you should find a way to automate them if at all possible. I write scripts, automatically process email with rules and filter RSS feeds to automate tasks and spend less time on things I can have the computer do for me.
Prune. Have less data to process. Dump those irrelevant newsletter subscriptions, drop the social network contacts who don’t have anything interesting to say and prune feeds out of your RSS reader. Focus on the important information and get rid of the rest.
Keep it simple. When faced with any task, look for ways to keep things simple and avoid spending time on complexity that doesn’t add much value. Simple document formatting is a good example. Focus on the content that matters without getting too caught up in having elaborate formatting that could create more maintenance problems later.
Get news from podcasts. I pick and choose the news sources important to me with a combination of mainstream news and news on niche technology topics, and I listen to that news when I’m doing household chores, driving, grocery shopping, working out and more. I get only the news I want, and I listen to it at times I wouldn’t otherwise be productive, which allows me to keep up with industry news while spending little time on it.
Take time to recharge. If you work constantly, you’ll look like you are busy, but you’ll burn yourself out. If you really want to be productive, you need to take time to workout, do something fun, take a vacation, read or do something else relaxing. You’ll find that you come back to work with new ideas and focused energy to make a real impact.

Share your productivity tips below.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user pasukaru76.

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Fed Up With Yahoo Mail? Here’s Your Escape Hatch

Colleen Taylor — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 23:08:00 +0000

Thursday’s Yahoo Mail blackout was the source of a lot of headaches, with some 1.2 million users said to be affected. As of press time, Yahoo’s Wikipedia page has been vandalized (screenshot below), and anecdotal reports continue to pour in from users who haven’t had access to Yahoo Mail for more than eight hours. For its part, Yahoo is still mum on the exact source of the glitch.

Judging from reader feedback on GigaOM, Yahoo’s outage has a lot of people thinking about making the switch to another email client. We’ve scoured the web for the best information on backing up your email or moving to another mail provider, but it’s important to remember no email provider is perfect. Whether it’s because you’re fed up or just a little spooked, it’s always a good idea to back up your data in more than one place.

TrueSwitch is a third-party provider of email switching services. The company will copy your messages and contacts, forward your mail to your new address, and notify your contacts about the switch. TrueSwitch is free if you’re migrating to one of its sponsors, which include Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, Comcast, and others.

Yippie Move supports migration between colleges and universities. The service costs $15 per account, but it covers a wider number of clients than TrueSwitch, like .edu email addresses at colleges and universities.

Google has an official “How To” on porting to Gmail from Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and others.

Microsoft jumped on the Yahoo outage news by offering free “Hotmail Plus” accounts to the first 1,000 Yahoo Mail users who make the switch to the “new Hotmail.”

With Mozilla’s Thunderbird, you can locally back up all your Yahoo email messages (or any other POP-enabled email, like Gmail). Unfortunately, Yahoo requires users buy a $19.99/year premium account for the ability to export POP data.

Tech how-to site Labnol.org has the most awesome and comprehensive post I’ve found about the ins and outs of migrating email.

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