Eliminate attachments.
Store your company information assets in the cloud and send links to them instead. Move attachments sent to you into your cloud and send links back to the sender.
Email is here to stay for a long time and is the preferred method of sending and receiving information through direct messages or notifications.
With the ability to send attachements, It evolved into an in-efficient file/document storage and retrieval system. Attachments eat up a lot of space and should be avoided.
Pretend that you have one document sitting on your local machine.
You just typed it and saved it on your desktop.
It's a new company policy to be released to all employees.
You need to get it approved by an executive before it can be released to everyone.
The old, in-efficent way to go about this:
- Attach the document in an email to the executive asking for appproval. (Now there are 2 copies. One on your desktop and one in your outbox.)
- Send the email to the executive. (Now there are 3 copies. A copy is sitting in their inbox and you still have one in your sent box and the original on your desktop.)
- The executive copies the attached document to their desktop. (4 copies exist)
- The executive reads and rejects the policy with changes. She saves another version with comments and emails it back to you in an attachment. (3 more copies. 7 total)
- You open the email and copy the attachment to your desktop and make the suggested changes. Then you send it back for final approval. (3 more copies. 10 total.)
- It goes back and fourth and back one more time. Only 3 revisions and its Approved!. (19 copies exist).
- You happily copy the approved version to your desktop and then send it off to all 158 employees as a new break room food storage policy! (179 copies exist)
- Everyone opens their emails and copies the policy to their desktop to read it. (337 copies)
So, within an hour, you got your company policy approved and distributed -but now there are 337 copies all over the office and in the email system. Your email administrator is pulling his hair out and you keep getting annoying messages that your email space quota has been reached.
The new efficent way:
- You type your company policy in an online Document. (1 copy exists)
- You see your boss is online and send her a chat message with a link to the online document. She responds and says she will look at it right now.
- You both access the document online and chat about what needs to be corrected. Changes are made as she asks for them, and she approves the document over chat.
- You embed the new policy document on the company intranet site and send out an email to all staff with a link to read it online. (1 copy exists).
Within 10 minutes you got your company policy approved and distributed to all staff. Everyone reads your original. Only one copy exists.
Now pretend that 10 minutes later, your boss tells you that she forgot to have you include something important in the policy. You both access the online document and the additional information is added with her approval. The original was already embedded on the company intranet site, so the changes are automatically reflected there. Done.
Try making changes to a policy that you attached to an email and sent out to 158 staff 10 minutes ago. Not so easy using the old way.
Google Docs in Plain English is a more entertaining look at the new way:
http://www.youtube.com/wa
If you're running out of storage on Gmail, what's the best way save space?
