In the two years that we've been focusing on providing a solution to the problems that teams face when collaborating on complex projects, it never ceases to amaze me how often we bump into people who tell us they basically use nothing more than email and instant messaging to collaborate on projects. When we meet new people related to what we do here at Riverock Technologies, we like to ask them about the tools they are currently using on their team to help them manage projects and collaborate on doing those projects. Time and time again the answer we hear, delivered with a somewhat sheepish expression, is email. Of course, we also hear of tools such as Microsoft Project and Sharepoint being used, but clearly it's in the minority. When we ask follow up questions on the usage of those tools, we usually find out they're not really being used by the people doing the actual work. Most if not all collaboration happens using email.

So, why haven't businesses figured out that they can do much better than email for helping their workers do more? Well, we have a few theories:

• Most business don't realize they have a collaboration problem. Figuring out a better way to manage the daily workload is probably not high on the priority list of a small business that is already swamped with trying to keep its head above water. It takes effort to do something different, so status quo wins.
• Email was the first business software tool that was used widely by the masses in an office setting to connect people together. It's what people have grown up with and are comfortable using. Heck, even my 66 year old mother has mastered the use of email, and she'll be the first to tell you she knows nothing about computers. People use what they know, and until the pain becomes great enough, they live with the friction.
• Businesses have been burned over the years from buying tools for their employees that went unused for one reason or another. Switching your business processes over to a new way of doing things, and getting buy-in from the planners AND the doers is not free, and it's not always easy. Doing nothing in this case wins.

So, with so many people using email to collaborate, why then do we throw cold water on it, and feel there's a better way?

• Email was never designed as a way for you to efficiently manage your work. Lots of information comes to you via email, and many people make the mistake of trying to use their email client to help them manage this influx of information. Years ago at a past job, I used a priority flag in my email client as a way to keep track of important emails that I eventually needed to do something about. While this approach sort of worked, I recall that eventually my list of 'high priority' emails grew to the point were it was difficult to know which of them was the most important thing that I should be working on right now.
• Email is disconnected from the system you are using to manage your team's work. When people send you work via email, you have to cut and paste things into your work management system, creating extra work for you.
• Managing work in email makes it difficult for others to follow along with the progress of that work. All the rich dialog you hold in email around the details of your work is only visible to those who have received the email. There is no one central repository of discussion associated with that work that all interested parties can refer back to at any time. And forget about keeping others informed on work you've started or completed - that is, unless you enjoy spending your day firing off email to communicate status instead of doing real work.
• Email makes it difficult to bring new team members up to speed. Have you ever been asked to help bring a new team member on board, and the best you could do was forward that person a slew of emails with files attached to them, or point them at some disjointed resources on your company intranet? Hopefully you didn't miss anything.
• Information stored in email is a ticking time bomb that goes off when someone leaves the company. If you have good proactive management that makes sure to properly capture the exiting employee's email storage, you might be ok. But, more often than not, the information and discussion stored in email archives gets lost in the shuffle, or, becomes hard to extract and utilize.
• Companies often have an e-mail retention policy that requires you to delete any e-mails older than a couple of months. So even if you wanted to keep information for future purposes, you can't.
• Your corporate e-mail is lost to you when you leave the company, so any personal items you were keeping in your corporate account vanish. The business you work for might not care about this, but I bet you do.

Email is a great tool for communicating with people, however it's really not a great tool for managing your work or for collaborating with others on that work. On-demand solutions such as OnePlace have stepped into this void to solve many of the problems that come from using email for things other than pure communication. With OnePlace, we offer many solutions for these problems, some of which are listed below:

• Tons of work management features for helping you effectively keep track of the work you need to do. First and foremost is the ability to schedule your work, so that you always know what you should be working on, and when.
• Topical discussions for allowing a group of people to hold rich dialog around a topic. Everything that was said is automatically captured and preserved for future reference.
• Ability to quickly see the status of all your teammates. You always know what others are doing and whether they are available or not.
• Group chat (Team Pulse) for quickly asking questions and getting answers, or for an informal online water cooler-like experience for your team.
• System notifications that help keep you informed of your team's activities.
• File upload. Store your files within the projects and tasks that require those files. You can even upload images into a discussion, and see them right in the flow of the discussion. This is a great way to collaborate around visual things like the design of a product brochure or a web site.

If you are currently on a team that doesn't use much beyond email for collaborating on your projects, some of these problems may resonate with you. The good news is that there are low barrier-to-entry solutions like OnePlace available on the web today. OnePlace offers a free 30 day free trial for all team plans with no credit card required. Taking it for a test drive is as simple as filling out form with a few questions on it. If your team is interested, please visit www.oneplacehome.com for more information on how OnePlace can become your central solution for collaboration.