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When visiting Sun Microsystems last week, I picked up a booklet they are currently giving away: "Being the best @ Email for Dummies", subtitled "Stop the email madness".

The book is actually part of the well-known John Wiley & Sons "... for Dummies" series. What is interesting is that Sun saw fit to sponsor its production, and commission one of their staff to write it.

Sun do offer an email solution. However, there is no advertising for this in their Dummies booklet. The only plug they make for their own products is for their Sustainable Computing initiative, which has no obvious relation to email.

Further, the advice given in the book itself does not necessitate use of Sun software or hardware in any way.

So why have Sun gone to the trouble and expense of producing this book and giving it away free?

TAKE AWAY

I have described in a previous blog post how "If you want efficiency in the 21st century workplace, email is the place to look."

It seems that Sun has got the message. They clearly hope to create the general impression that their company understands the pain felt by everyone currently using email (which is just everyone), and can offer a way forward.

What a shame, then, that their advice doesn't go nearly far enough. Most of the problems we all face with email are hardly touched by the Sun booklet:

• Discussions that fizzle out, fragment among different colleagues, or lose their purpose


• Attachments scattered all over your file system


• No way of ensuring use of a specific version of an attachment, or even of knowing what version your colleagues are using


• Actions that cannot be tracked, or for which you are not sure if anyone has even taken responsibility


• Doing work without knowing what value anyone is getting from it


• Having to spend too much time assembling audit trails for work carried out


• and so on.

Over the next few weeks I will be addressing these problems in this blog, and showing how they can be resolved via a new breed of lightweight software solutions. If you find email frustrating as a workplace tool, stay tuned.

Posted by keithhb in Email |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us