Mopsos

My friend and colleague Gilbert Brault (absent from the blogosphere) just developped today a nice little goodie for our Domino-based Lotus QuickPlace (QP) environment here at Schneider Electric. What it does basically is allow a registered user of a QP to post messages in whatever "room" of the collaborative space using e-mail as shown here:View image

A simple string of metadata included in the e-mail title allows the message to be routed automatically in a specific page other registered users can see and subscribe to (...)

This concept of integrating e-mail and collaboration was pioneered by the Kubi Software folks (Lotus people by the way) 18 months ago or so. Though I could never make it work through my company's firewall, the concept is great, and Gilbert's development is based on the same idea. I wonder if Kubi as a company is viable, but that is another question.

After weblogs and collaborative spaces six months ago, I recently posted something on blogs and Communities of Practices which was a first step, at least for me, in unifying collaborative spaces such as Quickplace and weblogs in a single framework. Many people have argued that e-mail was dead and vive RSS, which I find questionable.

Here's the catch:

• An e-mail address is tied to your identity as a member of a community in the broad sense of the word. Oftentimes this e-mail address is also tied to a particular web site adress where a lot of information related to your identity can be found. I have an e-mail address as a member of the Roulleaux Dugage family, another as a KM professional (tied to this weblog), another as an employee of Schneider Electric, another as the vice-president of an association in the south of France, another as an INSEAD alumnus, another as an anonymous freak (the hotmail one) etc. The point is that you select the e-mail address you give to others to reflect your identity in relation to this person. My family e-mail address for example is only given to my close friends, not to the tax authorities.


• An active collaborative environment implemented by a project team or a community of practice often gives its members specific e-mail addresses. It helps them prioritize e-mails coming from this group in their mail clients. Thus a first level of classification of e-mails by "community". It is very similar in nature to the RSS feed/aggregator approach: You only subscribe to those e-mails originating from selected communities


• The Gilbert Brault development goes one step further and goes into sub-classifications by special interest group, project, discussion topic etc. Assume you are an active member of a group of people collectively engaged in building a common knowledge base about, say, weblogs. You just attended the last group seminar and pictures were taken by everyone. You had such a good time that the site administrator opens a photo gallery on the website related to the event, and sends an e-mail (with metadata) to all participants asking them for their best pictures. The participants just have to attach their picture to a reply e-mail, hit the send key, and the picture will automatically populate the photo gallery.


• In the same way, you can elect as a user to subscribe to documents coming from a given group or subgroup of the community, in the same way you suscribe to RSS feeds today. At the end of the day, the user will not be able to make the difference between RSS feeds and e-mail

And of course the environment used for receiving and sending information will be the same: an enhanced version of Outlook or Bloomba .

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