Keep up the good work.
M.

The fourth bullet point hits home with me. Whenever I’ve worked virtually with groups of people on class assignments with a looming deadline I’ve found that so much confusion gets created this way. When people spend a long time crafting their email, often by the time it is sent much of it is irrelevant or, worse, causes more confusion.

Alongside this there is also the issue of attachments. When you’re working with 4 or 5 other individuals and everyone is sending and re-sending “Document1” to each other – which one is the most recent? Who edited it last? Does it conflict with other documents? I usually suggest the format, “DocumentName_EditorName_VersionNumber”. This and tracking changes tends to help with organization.

Somewhat off subject, but I love using Gmail because of the threaded conversations. When I had two teams working on finishing up some documents for a deadline and there were roughly 250 emails sent in a 24 hour period, Gmail ended up being a lifesaver in that respect. Keeping all of those replies in one thread made sure that the headache didn’t turn into a migraine. Now with Google Talk embedded in Gmail it even makes it easier…

Thanks.