Email out, Slack and Teams in for business communications The COVID-19 pandemic may trigger the end of email's dominance in business communications. That's the word from Spiceworks Ziff Davis (SWZD), which today published its first quarter report on the state of communications software in the workplace. For the first time since it started measuring in 2016, a slim majority of …
First of all, "slack" is an inside joke about the church of the sub-genius, with "Bob" Dobbs. That's a bunch of nitwits and I'm not stooping to that level. (Same goes for "slackware linux," bunch of shmucks yes a'la alfred e neuman.)
Second of all, Microsoft harassed me one time too many to "sign in to keep using microsoft teams." You know what happens if you stop signing in to keep using microsoft teams? You can stop using that stupid thing. Which is nothing but a rehashed crappy version of "Skype," with all the same echo and crash problems it ever had. Let's put it this way: I clearly recognize "test call" as being identical.
You know what works just as flawlessly as it ever has? That would be my SPA2102 "voip" adapter and my e-mail account. If you can't talk to me on the 'phone and you can't send me information via e-mail, then I guess you & I just don't have anything to discuss.
First of all I'm guessing if you know all about JR "Bob" Dobbs it means you've retired. Could be wrong, but just a guess.
Second of all, no one is saying you HAVE to use Slack. Just because everyone else is driving cars, you can still ride your motorcycle if you prefer.
Third of all, Slack is actually pretty useful in reality. You can have a bunch of alerts shared between your team, and discuss them right there in place. You could even kick off builds and do the whole "Chat Ops" thing, if that floats your boat. You can contact a bunch of people and get answers instantly, rather than waiting for an email chain.
Last of all, email sucks for most things. It still has its place, but people stretch it far too much.
Except the issue that workplace communications platforms get agreed on by "other people" and inflicted on everyone. Holdouts like our Slack and Bob averse OP form factions, and before you know it you have Google chat, slack, discord, and teams all open at the same time. Then someone rightly points out that thats idiotic and someone pulls rank and forces everyone to use their favorite, regardless of if it supports all the features people need, or if the message histories can be merged.
Then people realize they can't find anything from before, and start digging around for a copy in their email.
The answer here may be to fix some of the problems with email, not to use Slack, which people constantly "stretch the wrong way" to deal with it's blind spots. Using glorified IRC for everything isn't a better one size for all solution.
Google, M$ and slack have been working hard to stall email from advancing for years, and worked hard to ruin it before they pushed Chat/Teams/Slack on us in favor of SMS and short messaging like Slack.
If you can't talk to me on the 'phone and you can't send me information via e-mail, then I guess you & I just don't have anything to discuss.
The problem with this attitude is that eventually you won't have anything to discuss with anybody.
Unfortunately you can't demand that world + dog does business according to what you deem as "acceptable" or communicates in the specific ways that you feel are best. I'm afraid if you take this sort of stance on things then all that happens is ultimately you'll be the one who isn't on the right side of opportunities, growth and progress.
Even in the early 2000s some businesses wouldn't invest in IT/email and refused to communicate that way. Some of those businesses didn't survive. Stuff changes. Adapt with the times.
The Teams application on my work-issued laptop hasn't crashed the entire time I've worked here. I haven't had echo problems. If you can't get it to work properly then I'd suggest contacting a helpdesk as you clearly have issues.
Your SPA2102 adapter doesn't support collaborative video conferences with shared documents or whiteboards among a geographically diverse team.
It doesn't support instant messenging, something that allows asynchronous conversation between individuals and groups that's very distinct from email.
It doesn't support document storage or sharing.
I guess you're right, we don't have anything to discuss. We work with people willing to be accessible, collaborate and work as a team.
Not that I agree with all of OPs points or solutions, but "It works for me" is no better an argument for you on Teams than it does for him.
If you are using VOIP an email, you can still use whatever video call solution you want. Or whatever the other person decided to use, which is more often the case. Slack is 3rd string on those functions, and many industries are using Zoom instead of teams, so many sites wind up having both if the use Teams.
Same for document storage, where you can use Teams, but then you are stuck with it's limitations, plus having to support G Suite, Drive, etc etc.
And your use of the terms asynchronous and instant(synchronous) messaging is, well it's a choice. But the tendency to sling venom on other people for not using their favorite tool is one of the things that make the COMMUNITY of users around some of these tools like Slack about as fun to be around as Twitter, or 4chan.
Instant messaging means your message is instantly delivered. It doesn't mean you have to instantly reply, or that you instantly read it.
There can be less than a second or several hours between messages; it's still an instant messaging medium, the conversation is still a conversation, it just doesn't have to happen in real time.
So it is asynchronous. If I need a synchronous (remote) conversation I will call you, video or just voice.
Messaging is complementary to e-mail and can indeed be useful. However, you quickly enter area of incompatible protocols, data privacy and security and what to do with all the data if you want to change providers. Moreover, arranging appointments gets more difficult the more people you try to include. This is cumbersome anywhere where "I can't do Tuesday, Bob can't do afternoons, …" comes up. Conversational interfaces for calendars are the best solution, and it would nice to see better protocols for this. But this still won't resolve all scheduling problems!
So, let's replace a free, mature and easy to use standard (email) with a multitude of commercial, incompatible and mostly buggy proprietary programs apps. Seriously, isn't it glaring obvious?
Of course in a world where corporate communication is handled through Twitter or Facebook nobody sees the problem. You have to move with the times bro, be cool! Have a soy latte!
Point taken and points scored, but email is actually getting more expensive, the protocols are geriatric and sadly pretty much dead in the water, and it has been taken over by defective webmail clients, spam cartels, and security/privacy problems.
Most hosts have dropped domain hosting for email and want to charge $s or $$s per mailbox. Spam filtering then added on to that. If there is even a backup option, that is extra too. With no discounts for scaling that make any sense when a mailbox is a line in a config file, and a whole domain is just a few more. I can see charging for space, for traffic, and for add-ons like un-subscibe list management.
But most of these companies will happily quote you a price for a medium size biz where it is still MUCH cheaper buy hardware and to run it yourself. 15-20 years ago it was either free or a cheap add on to business class hosting up to the point where you needed a dedicated mail server. Now I have been seeing per email address prices in the teens and even aliases going for up to 5$ US. Thank god for overseas hosting companies, but I'd really rather keep my data in it's country of origin and deal with my own time zone. (that said, thanks to the OG hosts in New Zealand that are keeping my personal mail domain flowing, 65$ a year for about 15 mailboxes and nearly pure profit for them, but I could add 50 more and it wouldn't cost me another dime)
email is actually getting more expensive
Only if you use closed source facilities
the protocols are geriatric and sadly pretty much dead in the water
You're selling something, right? Email has been about the most persistently working protocol over time and needed surprisingly little change to keep workin. Until, of course, some corporate morons decided to create a proprietary version and that has been trouble ever sinc.
and it has been taken over by defective webmail clients, spam cartels, and security/privacy problems.
Which, as a result of being asymmetric, can be addressed. DM is in this respect so dangerous it should not be allowed to carry anything more dangerous than text. And whoever at Microsoft came up with making Teams automatically and unavoidably* start up should be made to dangle his bits in a piranha infested river.
* No, you can only switch it off locally. Try imaging 20 machines and see it show up every time when you log in for setup to see what a collosal time and resource waste that represents. I guess that definity makes it Windows compatibe..
So, the only answer is "email is not as good as it seems to be"?...
That sounds way too much like a "give a dog a bad name and hang him" type argument. Yes, email is old and uncool, yes, there are things it doesn't do as well as instant messaging solutions, but saying it has to be replaced by them is like saying a broom doesn't clean teeth as well as a toothbrush, so we need to replace all brooms with toothbrushes, ASAP. Ridiculous.
Of course you won't hold a meeting using email, but most communications are simple time-independent information transfers, and definitely don't require "real time" or video. And then there is the chaos of competing and most likely short-lived standards: I still have emails from the early 2000s, but I'm willing to bet half of the current messaging solutions won't exist anymore in 20 years' time. Irrelevant if it's just private chitchat, but can become annoying when it's professional communications with real-world implications.
(jockmcthingiemibobb, I'm speaking generally, not specifically to you.)
How typical of the weirdy beardy types to downvote you, when you make some good points.
SMTP is inherently weak/spoofable.
All the DMARC / DNS bla bla lash ups in the world hasn't prevented spam.
IMAP <puke>
Even Activesync (superior to IMAP) has been replaced by Azure edge malarky in "modern" Outlook. Which at least makes the client side work, but SMTP still stinks in front.
Email provision with the size of attachments/mailboxes these days.
So people either get it for free, by allowing Google to read everything or pay for it to save themselves the headache of Backup/DR/patching bla bla
We've had Teams for over 2 years now... And it accounts for around 15-20% of our communications.
Most people still send emails.
Most people still grab the phone, if it needs an immediate answer.
Some of us use Teams, but a majority still use the stable solutions. It is slowly taking off, but slowly. Around 1,3 messages per employee per day, on average - and I send a few dozen. We had a new system go-live last week, which boosted the figures, around 3,000 minutes of audio/video, but most of that is probably between a dozen people or so.
There's a reason for that. Email works best for time-decoupled work flows, i.e. teams operating across multiple time zones, different working hours, intermittent connectivity, and also across different platforms. Voice/video/IRC/Slack/Teams work best for synchronised work flows, i.e. teams working the same hours on a single shared problem set.
Both will be around for a long time.
Exactly, this is why I prefer forums to things like Discord as well.
Discord is great, if everybody is online for an event, but the ones I belong to start to really take off when I go to bed and everybody else has gone to bed, by the time I can check back in. That means a jumble of nonsensical messages with no relation to each other, other than the loose categories of the channels.
Forums, on the other hand are much better for threads and finding and picking up on conversations on a specific topic.
I think I'd be much more involved in Discord, if it was in my timezone, but I am on CET and most of the activity is during the day for the Pacific Coast of the USA...
I think there's a classical trade-off here. Once e-mail became ubiquitous it became a flood and people started looking for alternatives. Messaging is great for small groups and small things but can quickly become much more difficult to manage as messages grow.
What I do like about some of the messaging systems is support for conversational interfaces via bots/agents. The new Telegram API looks very promising in this regard. But interoperability and data sovereignty will remain a problem.
...is responsible for a lot of wasted time in my org. GIF's, smiley faces, in-jokes and now avatar icons spreading like a moronic wildfire. They forced everyone to get a desktop camera, then tell them to turn them off in every meeting. $57 a user a month for an E5. I'm staggered by the hardware I could buy if they gave IT the money instead. We gave up a managed and redundant 1GB network so people could use back alley, lowest bidder Chinese routers from home and they wonder why their call quality is garbage.
MS reports services down all the time, but the users blame us. Not one IT person was behind the transition from Skype to Teams, but we're the ones smeared by their crappy services going down every day.
Features appear without warning, completely open, so we're scrambling to close security loopholes continually. Then MS offers us security consultations to teach us how to turn off the features they turned on.
Collaboration documents people work weeks on, only to have a VP come in, say "that's wrong" then overwriting the teams work with their own plan that they've had all along. Yeah, what a winner Teams is.
Am waiting for the day MS is not accessible for a week. We'll get the blame for that as well, but I'll be smiling.
Sounds like you are working for the wrong company, and you clearly hate it. There are LOTS of jobs out there right now, or you could even try contracting if you are even half decent (and you can get on with people).
"Not one IT person was behind the transition from Skype to Teams"... how does that even work? Did they get the canteen staff to do it?
The problem with IT and cloud solutions is that you are often pulling out working, well maintained systems and replacing them with a geewhiz looking system that is outside your control, doesn't do what your business needs it to do and when it is not available, it is your fault and you need to get it working again ASAP!
"Teams is down!"
"Yes, Microsoft is having technical difficulties with their edge routers, again."
"No my problem, I have a conference in 5 minutes and I need to be there, the future of the company relies on me being in that meeting!"
If it is an in-house solution, you only have yourself to blame, or possibly your ISPs (primary and backup), if something isn't available. You get a good kicking for your own mess. With the cloud, the support & maintenance is outside your control, but you still get a good kicking for somebody else's mess.
Don't get me wrong, I use M365 and want the company to use more of its potential (we user Office local apps & Teams, but no OneDrive, Exchange, PowerBI, SharePoint etc.), but it is still disheartening and demoralizing, when you get blamed for Teams being offline or somebody's favorite feature has suddenly been removed.
From what I hear from others who have suffered its impact already, OneDrive is also worth avoiding like the plague as the way it syncs (if at all) is nigh uncontrollable. Mobile users and those with really large files like Adobe likes to pump out ought to avoid it. A bit like those updates which are scheduled when you're no longer on the company's time (read: when you shut down your machine for the day and you end up spending an extra hour waiting for the damn thing to actually stop updating - doesn't work on me, I'll close the lid anyway and deal with any problems the next day).
It appears that MS gave everything that barely works the moniker One (OneDrive, OneNote), so I'm left wondering why Teams isn't called OneTeams. You try working with it if you have network problems - horrific software.
When I am in a conference with 4 or more people, Teams can pretty much kill my i5 ThinkPad, it will use 3.5GB RAM and >70% CPU, it is about the only application that regularly causes the fans to kick in.
The biggest problem with Teams is that there is no Windows native app, it is Google's Electron platform. But I suppose that Microsoft are so strapped for developers who have an understanding for Windows and can develop for it using native tools from Microsoft...
Since moving to a workplace that uses Asana, internal email usage has dropped to zero. Which means it's easier to spot spam.
Using gChat internally also insulates us from cold calls.
HOWEVER, all of this is so much frippery when compared to the ever-increasing number of retailers that only offer a phone line. If your business model means your time is more important than your customers then you deserve to go bust.
A phone line that's answered by a human ranks in my estimation several miles about being fobbed off to a forum where users try to help each other and actual company members rarely make an appareance. That trick is pulled by practically every larger US company out there because it again saves a few pennies more for the shareholders. After all, support is always a COST..
The one thing I prefer about messaging over email is that you generally get some indication of whether or not it's been seen.
"Seen" doesn't mean read, or understood, and sure doesn't mean acted upon.
But with email you didn't know *anything* after sending it. The result of this was that a lot of people (notably management in larger companies) simply forwarded email and then considered their job done because somebody else was dealing with it. Apparently. Or if you sent an email to a restaurant to book a table, the only way you'd know if it had been read is if somebody confirmed your reservation... which didn't always happen. I remember going on holidays years ago and finding websites for restaurants with email contact forms that had about a <30% success rate of some response.
Of course messaging isn't a full solution to that problem but the very fact that you have some indication of *if* a message was opened, and can talk in real-time, is a genuine improvement over: send...... wait...... ???
My analogy with email is it's like putting money into a bank account but one where you can't view the balance. You have to hope it's gone in. At least with messaging you can get some confirmation of what's occurred.
That problems was "solved" for email as well, and it's always a double edged sword. Inconsiderate a-holes messaging you after hours, no respect for social boundaries, and people you don't want to talk to pestering you and creepily reminding you when they notice it either was or was not read.
So then someone like me writes a script/plugin/proxy to disable read recipts and enable a steatlth mode for online tracking. This gains popularity till it causes the original vendor to provide an off switch to avoid being sued in the EU, and the message receipts become permanently unreliable cruft and nothing but a privacy and security risk.
In reality, even inside an organization it's often abused more often than used, and it should only ever be opt-in per contact. That said, in mission critical or high stakes teams, reliable and verified communications can be a godsend. Like many tools, it has it's legitimate uses.
It's called read receipts and there's a reason I turn it off. If this is critical to you and you have the authority, you can make people enable it for anything. If you don't and some people are like me, then they won't turn it on because it is unreliable and annoying.
I scan over your mail and see that it exists, mentally adding it to my list of things to deal with. Since you only see that I have seen your message but you don't see that I have twenty other ones on that list, you might expect a quick response that you're not going to get. Alternatively, I scroll over it quickly enough that I've still registered its existence but I haven't triggered the threshold that informs you, so you think I have ignored it. Either of these can lead to people (probably not you, but they do exist) being angry that I'm ignoring them and complaining about how I choose to do my work. Those who complain, in my experience, never care what else I might be doing or why I do it that way. They complain less when I don't give them extra unreliable data and their first communication from me is either a reply to their request or an automatic response that I've deliberately created for requests such as theirs.
I just wish we'd pick one channel and stick with it. I have people messaging me directly in Teams, team message board posts, @mentions in Teams that produce Teams alerts requiring multiple clicks to clear, @mentions in Office & Azure DevOps that produce emails, emails to schedule calls & meetings that take place in Teams...
Just give me one @#$% channel to keep track of. I don't care which channel it is, but just pick one.
Worse, some of these file tickets, then email you a copy and send you a message Teams later enquiring if you got the email.
Well, they did. At some point I lost patience and informed such a loser in fairly precise terms what I thought of that, including an estimate of lost time as a result and offering a guess at such a ticket would fare in our queue.
Apparently word has gotten round.
No doubt via Teams..
Even worse if when months later you try to find a document that you know you've seen, but you can't remember if it was attached to an email, Teams message, in a Team site or on SharePoint - and of course, there is no universal search tool, even if you are using exclusively Microsoft products.
The problem with these tool is that they are rolled out without any guiding principles or governance and quickly become an unmanageable mess.
Yeah, and then even in Teams or Slack the discovery problem still persists, as unless you already know the exact wording of the answer your looking for, you have the "which channel/thread/team was this posted on" problem, followed with wading through all the chatter posts to try to follow a coherent discussion if it's not the only thing in the channel/thread. If it is, then you will have to wade through all of the channels this creates.
With training and strict discipline these tools can avoid becoming a tangled ball of string, but neither of those things is the lived reality in most organizations. It turns into a hybrid of twitter, reddit, and the 90's are company wide SMB file share. A social and data dumping ground.
The communication model they use is based on online chat, and it's just as flawed for most business communications as email was. The biggest problem I have with these platform is they keep pushing themselves as "the solution" and using email/the competition/everything-else-under-the-sun as a "problem". In reality, their platforms are better for some stuff, but fail to solve many of the other problems that made email inadequate by itself. So they need to drop the attitude and raise their game as much as everyone else.
This isn't made any easier by the fact we now have to "fix" the same problems in dozens of apps that don't work together, are on totally different architectures, etc. So the companies all decide to add video chat in lockdown, and 3/4 of them do it badly, instead of making a 3rd party video standard that works across their platforms.
Indeed, Teams search is fundamentally broken by design.
It finds the message containing the word, but refuses to show the context. Which is of course the entire reason you searched...
Thus Teams can only be used for ephemeral conversations, any decisions must be sent by email or put into a ticket tracking system.
The interesting thing to me is that deferred communications - email and bulletin-boards at the time - were once welcomed as the cure for "instant messaging" (phone calls and desk walk-ups) that were plaguing people's concentration and productivity through constant interruptions.
Has there been a shift in brain function as a result of social media that means people are better at multitasking or has impatience trumped considered thought?
Just today I was supposed to be assisting in the launch of a website produced with the assistance of an array of modern communication tools in which, it transpired, much of the content was still greeked text and the name of the client was mis-spelled throughout. Attention to detail has to start with attention.
"Has there been a shift in brain function as a result of social media that means people are better at multitasking or has impatience trumped considered thought?"
(b), definitely. There's a place for deferred communication (memos, letters, telegrams, telexes, email) and there's a place for instant communication (talking, telephone, IRC, Slack,...) and both will survive for ever.
I know people who believe that the only decent communication tool is GitHub. Go figure.
IM isn't supposed to be instant reply though.
It's "I would like to discuss this, please respond when you have time to do so".
The reason it's better than email is that it triggers discussion, while email is info-dump.
The reason it's worse is because they're all Electron now, and the search function is totally broken in most of them.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
