Lists work well to a certain extent but would not be suitable for a number of cases. Say a team member decides to add an existing email conversation to the list at a later point in time. This would break the original email thread structure when added to list. What happens to an email in a conversation which came from someone outside the company. Someone forwards it to list again? Say someone forgets to do a "reply all" in an ongoing conversation, this email never lands up in the list.
We like using email for most of our tasks too. We use our own product GrexIt's (http://grexit.com) Shared Labels to share information and even collaborate right from our email inbox. Shared labels allow you to share particular Gmail label among a group of people in your company. Every email conversation on which a shared label is applied gets pushed to the user's inbox who were part of the shared label. All followup emails that arrive in an ongoing conversation also keep getting shared automatically. This approach requires minimal effort to share information and works better than lists. Most importantly users continue to access information from their inbox itself.
We use the shared labels approach for a variety of use cases like support and development. As soon as support email arrives to the support@ email-id it get shared with everyone. We have shared labels with every team member's name, say Task:John. To assign an email to someone, we simply apply the user's shared label on that email. This allows us to collaborate easily without needing any
3rd party tools
You would rather risk losing your data more keeping with yourself. This is a stupid post. Clouds solutions generally implement good backup solutions and with almost 100% availability to the data. Google has anyway restored more than 50% of the lost data.
I can't put a number on the amount of people I know who don't regularly back up their files themselves. One in particular lost gigs of precious photos during a laptop hard drive failure.
A company whose mandate is to provide continuity of service is going to be more reliable than 'oops I forgot to copy my files to this cheap crappy consumer drive I bought'.
Still, this incident should serve to remind that the so-called 'cloud' isn't invincible and we should try to cover our bases through multiple backups.
I suppose a cloud app is needed which would help us to backup data across multiple/popular cloud services. Chances of data being lost reduce drastically (almost to zero) if multiple clouds are keeping a backup of the same data.
Stack overflow has probably been the best Q&A site around, content-wise, user-experience wise and probably every other criteria a user would care about. Good work !
Agreed. I've found it especially valuable as a bit of a teaching tool lately. I spent three years in a mind-numbing COBOL-based job, and now I'm building a PHP application to try to showcase the fact that I am more than the sum of my career, and to try to find a decent job.
Since I'm doing this in isolation, I'm trying to use StackOverflow as a surrogate mentor. When I have a question about how to do things, mostly design issues, I can usually find an existing discussion (yes Jeff, discussion) on the topic. It sucks up an awful amount of my time, but I feel like I've grown a lot professionally because of it.
About the only drawback is that it's now so popular that new questions only show up on the front page for a few minutes. So finding questions to answer - or getting your question answered is becoming harder - unless you are prepared to do a very narrow subject specific search.
One of the nice things about the early SO was it was so broad, you could see interesting questions that weren't directly in your language and read those as well.
Right balance is relative to your business and at what state you are in currently. For a t=0 startup, I would rather concentrate on finishing the basic feature set and launching asap rather than spending time looking around. For a business which is entering a growth stage keeping tabs on competitors and what's new makes more sense.
