Email is playing a significant role in the way every organization is management today. Organizations are run by emails these days. I’ve heard from many people. So, emails are a life blood organizes most of the company activities. Now, let’s think about product development organization. Email is the main application that helping you to organize working activities. Companies are innovating and trying to find a "next big thing" around the organization of people’s activities, communication and collaboration. Today I want to share with you two examples that, in my view, represents two potential directions to improve people communication and collaboration.
Email Content Navigation
The following application coughs my attention. Meshin presents a way to structure emails and discover a connection between your emails and other related content such as people, organizations, topics, etc. The idea of Meshin came from the analyzes of information that located in Outook or email. Take a look on the following interesting video presenting Meshin sidebar allowing you to get relevant information. Meshin allows you to find an information contextually connected to your communication stream.
[youtube=[youtube http://youtube.com/w/?v=chGeOYUKATg]]
Social Product Development
In one of my previous emails, I touched a new trend – social product development that emerged today. Yesterday, I attended a webinar presented a new version of Vuuch. You can take a look on the press release announcing Vuuch 3.0 navigating to the following link. As it states in the press release, Vuuch a new ESS (Enterprise Social System) for PLM and CAD users that enables to team to work together in new ways using familiar tools. What I liked in Vuuch is the ability to enable connections between people’s activities and so called "deliverables". Vuuch allows you to keep track of people’s communication and decision making. Also Vuuch supports offline communication by delivering messages to your Outlook account and integrating Vuuch environment with Outlook.
[youtube=[youtube http://youtube.com/w/?v=M0sQ17C1K00]]
There is a reason why I decided to talk about these two approaches together. The goal both products are trying to achieve is a very similar to improve personal productivity and help people to get the job done. Meshin is analyzing your email stream and getting you an access to a relevant content connected to your email activities. If you think about product development organization run by emails, this can be a very interesting approach. As opposite, Vuuch approach is very interesting, in my view. Vuuch provides a tool to create a social connection already during people’s work. It is interesting to see both approaches and compare them together.
What is my conclusion? People are starting to focus on personal productivity. To get the job done is an important objective. These two applications represented different approaches to solve this problem. In my view, we wll see more examples of tools focusing on how to help individuals in an organization to make their work more efficiently. It should happen without taking "a grandiose plan" to re-engineer organizational processes. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
