This text is a fictitious conversation that happened in different variants over the last years.
Someone
Me
I get too many emails can you help me
Could it be possible, that you also do write a lot of messages? Have you ever thought about using other tools like Microsoft Teams or our ESN ConNext (HCL Connections).
But I like how I can organize everything in my folders in Outlook.
Where is the folder structure in Google? If you do get too many messages you will spend more time sorting than you will gain by knowing in which folder it is. You need to start to use more search and less folders.
I will try it when i got time, but tell me why should I get rid of email.
When was the last time you have sent a private eMail to someone? I bet you are privatly using chat tools most the time. Why is it totally normal to use eMail at work where at home you don't use it at all? You also just told me you get too many emails, if you do not change something you can not expext a different result. Email is very often misused. As an example have you ever tried to do your meeting minutes directly in OneNote instead of sending an additional email after the meeting. It's so much easier.
I didn't start with OneNote because someone told me Microsoft will stop OneNote.
This question is asked every 2-3 months from someone, because they do not read the complete story. OneNote will no longer be part of the Office package. But we do have the subscription Office365. There it will still be included. In addition every Win10 computer does have a native app called OneNote in it. So OneNote is far from disappearing.
Okay okay, but why do we need Teams
Teams is a team collaboration tool. With the help of Teams you will reduce the communication efford, because the receiver of a message can decide now what channel (topics) he is interested in. As a result he will get less emails he is not interested in. This is not possible with eMail. See Blogentry
But Teams is not possible with externals
This is true because we had to deactivate it, we might get it activated later. But you can use the "email to channel function" of Teams to bring any message directly into Teams and go on discussing there. For internal communication there is almost no use case where you have to use eMail.
…. some time later
Teams is not working
What exactly
Teams is running very slow. It is a very bad software.
It is true that teams is using quite some resources of your computer, but in 90% of the cases the reason is a slow old computer, teams is just exposing the real problem.
The video calls also don't work. Teams is a bad software
There are three possible reasons for a bad video call. 1. You don't have a good communication hardware in use. 2. You do have a bad internet connection. 3. The communicaiton software (Teams). In many cases it is not Teams that is causing the problems. So please first try to exclude the first two with the help of your local IT.
Can we delete the chat history of Teams
You can‘t. You can just delete single messages. Why do you want to delete it?
As we have Teams now can we get rid of our ESN ConNext
No we can't. We need ConNext for company wide exchange. Teams is a closed communciation tool. You can not build a network with Teams. This only works with ConNext. See Blogentry. With Teams you can also share files very easy.
I don't want to share my documents. I like to send them via email. Thas so much easier than sharing it
Have you ever tried to open a Teams chat and drag and drop a file into it. You will automatically share the file via OneDrive and you can go on working with it. No more "could you please share me the latest version of". You can even do coauthoring with multiple people.
You said it's OneDrive i don't like cloud storag. It is bad.
Your mails are also in the cloud!. What do you think our Did drives have been? They were stored in servers in our company. The only difference is now that we pay now another company to run them.
The cloud is not secure
Do you really believe our IT is better than the IT of Amazon and Microsoft. Their business model depends on how secure our data is.
I heared our cloud data is stored in the US.
All of our data is stored in the European data centers of Microsoft
….. some time later
I tried everything you said, but now I do get so many emails out of ConNext and Teams
Deactivate them and also deactivate every other notification. Instead you should look into the tools twice a day. Take a fixed time every day and check it then.
Okay but still it is so complicated now. I get too many messages on too many different channels
There are different tools for different purposes and you have to learn what to use in which case. This is why we do have the GUIDES to help you there or you could check the Tool Finder.
But it doesn't help because everyone I am working with is using something different. We have to align how we want to communicate in our departments. What tool should we use?
The question about the tool should not be the first question. What is your current departments communication strategy. If you do not know how you currently communicate how do you want to improve it. The second question you need to answer is what do you want to achieve with your communcation tools. Then we can talk about what tool would fit your needs.
We allways need to meet in person. it makes all the difference. It’s the only way to bring something forward.
Have you ever tried to use a video call to replace some personal meetings.
I don‘t have a camera
You need to buy one.
…… some time later
Why should I do a video call. It's enough to hear each other. I will not start my camera.
Last time you said meeting is person is so much better and now you refuse to use a camera? Of course it would be the best if you could always meet in person, but to be honest. Having a video call with someone with that quality comes quite close.
I do have soo many meetings each day
Do you invite for many meetings yourself or do you get invited. Have you ever thought about making meetings shorter but prepare them much better upfront so you do not wast the time of all people attending. You can use the OneNote integration for that.
To be continued…..