Why Do You Need to Integrate Your Email Client and Your Team Workspace?
Last week in New York City, we had our quarterly meeting of sales executives. We spent time analyzing customer requirements, and here are some key take-aways:
Enterprise IT organizations are strategic about collaboration. The economic downturn has not altered this trend; in fact, it might have even increased it, as business users need tighter collaboration in order to do more with less.
As a result, enterprise IT is adopting SharePoint strategically at the enterprise level; SharePoint adoption has evolved from departmental and project-driven to centralized and strategy-driven to take enterprise collaboration to the next level.
As most of the business information is coming through emails, locked in personal Inboxes, a collaboration strategy needs to include the ability to easily publish information from your email client to your SharePoint site.
As a result of the above, an enterprise-wide collaboration strategy needs to include:
- The ability to drag-n-drop a document, which has been received, as an attachment to your SharePoint or Quickr site. This document now becomes “collab-able”, e.g. available to your team for collaboration.
- You should also be able to take important emails with their attachments and simply drag-n-drop it to your Team Workspace. The body of an email often includes critical business information so the entire email with its attachment needs to be ‘collab-able”.
- This applies not just for emails and attachments but also for any type of personal information such as my travel schedule from my calendar, which I may want to publish to my team calendar.
- For collaboration software to be effective, you need an easy way to move information from your personal space to your collaborative space and vice-versa. Today we live in two disconnected worlds: we stare most of the day at our email client getting locked in our personal information space and only sporadically moving into our team workspace.
Your email client might be Notes, Outlook, or Gmail and your collaborative space might be SharePoint, SharePoint On Line, or Quickr. The collaborative desktop needs to bring the personal and the collaborative spaces together.
