Monday, July 23, 2007

Project correspondences etc.

A project team has members coming from different companies at certain times.  Aside from that, each person has quirks and preferences. In particular, email preferences. There are those who check their Gmail account more than anything, there are those who use Outlook and download their mail.  To be honest, I still check my Gmail more often than the company email even now that we've migrated to Google Apps.

Anyhow, it is understandable that people would need to always check their email.  And if you do assign them project email addresses so you all have uniform domain names and addresses, they won't necessarily check that email address. Especially if you only give them web UI and it sucks.

To be honest, I hate the Microsoft Exchange web UI.  It's horrible if you're used to Gmail. Or Horde for that matter. My goodness. Looking for contacts is a pain in that UI. And if the Exchange server is down or inaccessible most of the time, the members would actually end up not using it at all.

So if one of the team members insist on sending email to those addresses, the 'official addresses', the members would not be reached.  And that's bad.  There's no point in emailing them information. It won't make sense anymore.  Solutions could be:
1. sending them email via BCC -- use their preffered email addresses!
2. email them separately
3. improve the mail server's uptime, etc. so people won't feel discouraged to use it
4. forward emails to the preferred addresses

Anyway, communication is important in a team.  Email will still be consolidated even if you're using various addresses and you have to know what works. Really. It's the way you could bring your team together.

--
Clair Ching
Business Analyst and Project Manager
Orange and Bronze Software Labs | http://software.orangeandbronze.com
Blogs: http://clair.free.net.ph | http://learning-at-work.blogspot.com

1 comment:

Ealden Escañan said...

I believe in sending official mail to official addresses because it allows a company to keep track of all official communication (I've officially overloaded this post with the word "official").

O&B moving to Google Apps is kinda like that, to keep O&B people from forwarding mail to other accounts. And when you forwarded mail in BizMail, you CAN'T save a copy in the BizMail inbox :/

But I definitely agree on keeping the mail service available all the time - what's up with all the downtime!

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