Google Wave - could be the end of the email inbox

By Nick Hortovanyi

I started watching the Google I/O Keynote yesterday, and thought this is going to eat up nearly an hour and an half of my time, so I put it on the back burner.

Off I went reading my blogs and others sites. Eventually I came across an article written by Mary-Jo Foley - "With Wave, did Google jump the (Microsoft) shark?".  Now if Microsoft commentators, were on the bandwagon, shooting down a developer preview, something really interesting must be happening. Today, I found an excellent write up over at Tech Crunch - "Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For a New Web.". I had to put away some time to watch the YouTube video.

This Google Wave Developer Preview presentation at Google I/O blew me away.

From a technical perspective it shows the power of browser applications, especially those using the newer features of HTML5 (this would appear to be the start of more to come). More importantly it is integrating the various streams of communications (email, twitter, IM, wiki etc) into a consistent interface. As information is updated on one screen, all participants in the "wave" see the update, which unlike email happens in real time.

The technology is going to be open sourced, using a published protocol - info can be found here for the Google Wave Federation Protocol with Google Code hosting APIs and samples.

Tags google+wave email lifestreaming microsoft   |  Comments 0

Google apps for your domain - practicing what I teach

By Nick Hortovanyi

For a while we have been running our own email server with a postfix setup using google apps for your domain (GAFYD) for calendar services. I'd setup GAFYD under a different domain from toasttechnology.com (yes, it was a little untidy) and also wanted to integrate everything in salesforce.com with a complete integrated move to the cloud.

It didn't take very long at all to create a new toasttechnology.com GAFYD setup including updating the DNS entry per google's instructions.  If you do it yourself, watch out for the first couple of days, as some emails may still arrive at your previous email server's IP address. It was also easy to integrate google apps with salesforce.com. Now I can send an email directly inside of salesforce.com through gmail and have it recorded against the appropriate contact.

I should of done this ages ago, as now I'm using IMAP so it doesn't matter from where I view an email or from where I send it. All devices including my iPod touch are updated. As I've made the move, and haven't had any troubles, I'm confident now to recommend it to others.

Tags salesforce apps google email gafyd   |  Comments 0

Getting out of Email Jail - Email Jail Bail

By Nick Hortovanyi

We've been cutting back on email for a while. Today, Alex has written an excellent wiki entry on Email Jail. So if you have an overcrowded inbox, and who doesn't now a days that is sitting in a large organisation, check out Alex's solution overview being Email Jail Bail. In it Alex is proposing to use a Wiki as the means of getting out.

Now if you think there are other solutions for Email Jail, you can register and update the wiki yourself. For those not inclined to register there is an open discussion page (well open at this time).

Using a Wiki in this way enables many to many communication, removing potentially a lot of duplicated email communication in an organisation.

Tags communication email wiki discussion email+jail+bail email+jail   |  Comments 0

Cutting back on email

By Nick Hortovanyi

There are a lot of people I know that are bombarded with email and for many of them it has become one of those dreaded daily chores. It is even worse when left unchecked for a period of time. I've heard a new term that aptly describes this phenomenon as "Email Jail".

Luis Suarez, a Social Software Evangelist from IBM, has been actively experimenting on "Giving up on Work e-mail". His status report for Week 4 makes for a very interesting read. I've been communicating with him through twitter on this subject and he still receives email but then actively encourages conversation through other means and tools.

About a year ago,  I wrote about email, in a blog entry titled "Email that's what I use to talk to my Grandfather" inferring that the newer generations entering the workforce, or indeed currently working in it, expect more modern tools for communicating then just emails. Invariable, they use other tools to communicate to their friends and associates but revert to email to communicate to their older relatives. A year on I've seen a steady rise in the usage of sites like facebook from within the confines of the corporate work environment. Some organisations have embraced these off-premise communication means and some have blocked them. But for both, email is an issue. The availability of which now has a critical impact on daily operations.

We actively use Lotus Sametime for our daily work, Alex has written up a blog entry on his experiences with it. This enables us to minimise our email usage, to really offline communication (Offline Sametime would be good IBM) or to information that we need to send external to other organisations. Everybody I show Sametime to, is impressed with it as we can also share screens (take control of other screens), use white boards and quickly capture screen shots and snippets in a conversation to expand meaning.

Now we are also experimenting with a wiki server for public and offline "walled garden" communication and it is open to others, who register, to collaborate on content with us. More on this later in another blog entry, as I see this as being an ongoing exercise.

For us, we lose productivity if our Lotus Sametime services is not available, thus it would be more critical for us to have that facility operational than email.

So if you are stuck in "Email Jail" the first step is to acknowledge it and the second step is to find other means to communicate. Even picking the phone up can be an escape (we'd prefer to use a VOIP service like Skype over traditional  landlines).

Tags sametime communication email productivity community wiki email+jail skype   |  Comments 2