Yesterday, I talked about enterprise email apps and services with Dmitri Leonov, VP of Growth at Sanebox, and Will Kelly, Senior Technical Writer and blogger at Tech Republic. The apps we covered: Divide, Box OneCloud, AwayFind, Contactually, Sendgrid, Silent Circle, Trend Micro, and Sanebox. The hangout is posted in full below. If we missed any you like, let me know!
Email overload has become a hot topic lately. According to a recent study by McKinsey, an average employee spends 13 hours a week reading and responding to email. That's almost 30% of our time! Companies are looking for ways to replace email with services like Yammer, or just turn it off. Unfortunately email overload is not the problem. It’s the outcome of a much larger problem — there simply is more work, requiring communication with more people, faster.
Email is a perfectly good communication protocol, and it's not going to be replaced in the near future. Think of email as the four wheels that get you around – they supported the Model T just as well as they support Tesla. The part that needs innovation is what’s on top of those four wheels — it’s how you process and act on information you receive. Luckily there are lots of companies developing innovative solutions on top of email, making it better and more useful for employees and entire organizations.
We'll be reviewing some of our favorite email add-ons, including SendInc, Divide, Box OneCloud, AwayFind, Contactually, Sendgrid, Gander, and Sanebox, during a hangout we're hosting Tuesday, September 18th, at 1PM EST/ 10AM PST. While we can only have 8 direct participants, we'll be broadcasting live, so everyone is welcome to follow along!
The event is posted here. You can also stay up-to-date by adding Sanebox and Riparian Data to your circles, and checking back with us Tuesday!
And you know what? The authors of these posts are totally right. App X is fantastic--almost as good as App Y!
One problem: App X is for Gmail only.
Another problem: App X has all the IT-friendliness of vintage LimeWire.
Taken alone or in combination, these problems mean that many of these great strides being made in consumer email stand little chance of being mimicked in the enterprise. Which is sad, because it’s our work email that really needs to be good.
That being said, there are a few lights at the end of the enterprise tunnel, a few companies whose applications decrease the email headaches of both the user and the administrator. Because third party email applications not a subject that gets much play, Dmitri Leonov, VP of Growth at Sanebox, and I decided to co-host a Google+ hangout about it. On slate for discussion:
This hangout will take tentatively take place Tuesday, September 18 at 1PM EST/10 AM PST. It is totally free and open to all. Though only 8 people can directly participate, we will be broadcasting live, and the hangout will be uploaded to our respective youtube channels immediately post-facto.
If you’re an IT admin with an email beef, we’d love to see you there! Can’t make it? Spread the word!
As we all know, email is about as broken as the current Congress. Over the course of roughly 100 interviews with highly active emailers, several common complaints emerged:
There isn’t a panacea (yet!), but each of the following 8 apps, plugins, and services solves at least one of the aforementioned complaints.
If you get too many newsletters:
If you want to be able to defer some emails and remind yourself about others:
If you want to convert text to calendar items in one-click:
If you need to see important emails first, and Priority Inbox isn't cutting it:
If you want sleeker, more navigable versions of Apple Mail and Mail.app:
If you want diesel search:
If there are certain senders whose emails you want to see instantly, at all hours:
If you want to be able to do anything you can do from a browser inside your inbox:
If you want better threading (who doesn't?):
Have you used any of these tools? Are there any I haven’t mentioned that you love? Drop a line in the comments or get @ me!
How much do you want to bust out Mean Girls now? Vintage Lohan, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and 2000-calorie energy bars! You’re welcome.
Anyways, as we brick-by-brick our email client, I’ve been busy checking out successful and less successful players in the email improvement space. Initially, my goal was to ferret out features that are present in the former camp and lacking in the latter. Some of the popular features are in the reminder/scheduling camp, including the abilities to defer an incoming email for a later date and schedule a response for a specific date. Some are in the prioritization/categorization camp, whether it’s a simple spam/graymail/important or subject-based categorization. There are also the in-line activity, readability, and unsubscribe-me camps.
And then there are push notifications. For those clients and services with mobile options, push seems to be the most cited indicator of “should I buy it?” AwayFind’s value is built on (a filtered version of) push. Sparrow, the very popular iPhone Mail app replacement, currently only has it for jailbroken iPhones (and just came out on the losing end of a 16,000 signature campaign asking Apple to grant them VoIP privileges).
Security aside, there is another reason not to enable push notifications for email: like Josh Smith, I find them intrusive. I’m a big believer in the twice (okay, sometimes thrice) a-day inbox check—I find I’m much more productive when I don’t have my unread count sneering in my periphery. If you get massive amounts of email, this method most likely will necessitate a prioritization service—Sanebox’s seems to be the best.
Obviously, there are some instances where I do need to be on standby, and for them, I like to use AwayFind’s SMS option, since the service allows only emails from a select group of people to get through.
Does this mean our own mobile email client won’t support push notifications? I can’t say. We will be storing user data on our own servers, so enabling push is technically feasible, but the decision will probably in large part be user-determined.
Do you currently/have you ever enabled push notifications for your mobile email? Do you think it’s a necessary feature? Weigh in in the comments!