Methods for Information Distribution? 38
Prep asks: "We're all faced with a glut of information. Everyone where I work seems to use email as their primary means of information distribution. However, thanks in part to huge file attachments and a massive influx of spam, email delivery times are now apparently exceeding the times that our user base deems acceptable, so I've began to wonder about other means of informing users of changes to information they deem important. Ideally, the user would subscribe to various feeds (changes in their network share filesystem, various intranet webpages being updated, RSS feeds, etc) and notifications of changes to those sources would be pushed to them on an automated basis. I'm wondering if an IM based solution might not be useful here. I can't imagine this is an isolated problem, and wonder what other /.'s are doing to address it."
Agents (Score:4, Insightful)
Fascinating field, but darn tricky. New waves of paradigm shifts (okay, jargon changes) come and go, but the need for good agents remains.
Currently, the best agents are still, well, graduate students and secretaries.
Re:Agents (Score:2)
Re:Agents (Score:1)
blog (Score:1)
We're about to try a different way of communicating with the client about project status and issues. We're going to use a blog system, allowing posts and responses to issues as they arise. We plan on using Squishdot [squishdot.org] in Zope [zope.org].
A full-blown problem tracking system is more than we need, but email makes it somewhat more difficult to ensure that everyone involved can see and participate in a whole thread about an issue. We can also set it up so people receive an email to notify them when someone has added to
Re:blog (Score:2)
We can also set it up so people receive an email to notify them when someone has added to the thread.
Yeah. Right. So now I get a message that says I need to go look at something else, rather than a message with actual content. Great.
Why not just set up an e-mail list? Set it for "reply to list by default": not a good idea for public lists, but reasonable for internal lists where you don't really want private replies.
Or ditch the e-mail notification for the blog, so I can participate or not, as I choos
Re: (Score:1)
Do what I do (Score:4, Funny)
True, email is a great way of broadcasting information using little effort on your part. However, there is an even easier solution: use the "page" feature on your office phone!
You'd be surprised at the response you get. Everyone in the company will get to receive your important information. I use page for everything:
"Hey, there's a new memory leak in our code! I think it has something to do with the GUI. Whoever screwed up, please fix it right now. Some of us are trying to work!"
"Just wanted to let you all know that I'm uploading a change to TreeViewWindow.cpp right now!"
"Can one of you secretaries put some new coffee in the coffee machine in the kitchen? We're all out."
It's unfortunate that technology has blinded so many of us to much simpler solutions to our communications problems. The next time you need to disseminate information to your work associates, don't use email: hit that page button instead!
GMD
Re:Do what I do (Score:2)
Re:Do what I do (Score:2)
Hunting for some other solution is just looking at the symptom. Interoffice email is clogged with domain-wide announcements of things that usually have very little to do with the majority of users. What we really need is a reformation of email practices; better targeting of the audience is a good start. If the email system doesn't support group addresses, or makes it difficult
Re:Do what I do (Score:1)
Why would someone disturb everybody in the office with something that isn't urgent?
It breaks concentration and it most of the time an usually an useless call or a call for 1 or 2 persons.
WikiWiki (Score:3, Interesting)
However, I work at a pretty small company. I don't think that a WikiWiki site would serve the needs of 5000 employees, simply because you don't get the "personal responsibility factor" check and balance for making changes to the Wiki. I can see it now....Fred in accounting says that we all get 20 weeks off a year! Horray!
Re:WikiWiki (Score:2)
Too bad, too. I'm slowly dragging the 'openly ignorant' into seeing that there's something beyond either rolling your own or buying and living with bad investments. Twiki raised quite a few eyebrows, though not enough to get a spare machine just for
Re:WikiWiki (Score:2)
Re:WikiWiki (Score:2)
methods (Score:5, Interesting)
more links to shared-drive files rather than copies of such in the emails
create a web page that scrapes/shows the timestamps on files/urls. allow users to add/remove items on this list (self-customized per user)
focus employees to avoid "CC to all" mentality unless collaborative work is actually going on. "FYI" emails are best put on a bulletin board or bb-page
break employees into stronger focus groups that work within themselves and deliver results on a set schedule (1x a week, month, etc)
tighten the spam filters
update everyone's email address names and have them send out a notice to crucial clients
employ a local web-based email system, save your network's bandwidth for when people really download the attachments
encourage more IM-based conversations (more immediate, more collaborative) over email
Some tools (depends on what you're trying to solve (Score:2)
a document management system, such as those by Hummingbird [hummingbird.com]
a portal, such as Sharepoint [microsoft.com]
We use both of these. Sharepoint (yeah, it's Microsoft -- deal with it) is great; it'll allow a lot of customization, looks snazzy, etc., etc. Hummingbird's products -- I hesitate to bring them up, because they're so problematic (and their technical support is atrocious), but when they work, they're rather fabulous. They also have a KM product which can crawl the DM (document management) repositor
Underused protocol (Score:1)
NNTP is what you need for distribution of information. You can set up newsgroups for every possible special interest in your company.
Re:Underused protocol (Score:1)
YAW.
Define Information & Delivery (Score:1)
You really haven't provided enough information for anyone to thoughtfully respond to your question. There are thousands of ways one might notify people of changes. Before offering suggestions, one would need to know what information is changing, how important it is for your users to know of these changes, frequency of the changes, technologies that dominate your work culture, etc.
Example: You user base might be interested in real time stock ticker feeds and news about their company. Real time stock feeds
IM is just like email... (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, common email systems could use some improvement, just don't expect human nature to change simply because the app [sort of] did.
Heh (Score:2)
Problem:
"...email delivery times are now apparently exceeding the times that our user base deems acceptable..."
Solution:
Get rid of MS-Exchange!
Re:Heh (Score:2)
Hotline (Score:3, Informative)
You can get the compiled binaries of the open source non-banner clients at the following URLs: PC Client [hldownload.com], Mac Client [hldownload.com]
And the servers here: PC Server [hldownload.com], Mac Server [hldownload.com]
Info for the app is here:
Hotsprings [hotspringsinc.com]
Info on the open source projects here:
Opensprings [opensprings.org]
Jabber (Score:2)
It provides "Presence" so you can see who is Online/Away/Busy/etc, which can be great when you want to ask someone a quick question. Being an IM, messages are sent promptly. I've never seen anyone spam the jabber network, and there are checks in place to try and prevent it ever happening, but even if spammer
Arliweb (Score:2)
Email Delivery Times (Score:1)
Seriously
I get the impression you're talking about intra company traffic, so you can do this.
1) Get all you servers to give priority to the sort of messages you're talking about.
2) Set up an extra mail system which ONLY handles the sort of mail you're talking about and have all the clients check it.
The details of this would depend on your network arch etc but its hardly going to break the bank. Also it would be up and running in days not months.
Just a though
IM and news (Score:2)
News has many features ideal for business, and better than IRC due to the ease of following a conversation after-the-fact.
With email, if you have a group of people discussing a topic, every single person gets a copy, and someone joining in later will have no way of knowing the previous conversation.
With news, all the data is stored centrally and only looked at by people who want to look at it (ie: not pushed
Jabber is one option (Score:1)
At my last company, one group had set up a Jabber server, although very few folks in my business unit were using it (in favour of AIM). However, our group ran into an e-mail problem and Jabber just happened to be part of the solution.
The problem: Code builds were happening on one server (which I owned from a sysadmin POV), but the e-ma
Change user habits, not email (Score:2)
I'd focuss on making things work while minimizing the change to user habits, since users don't like to learn new ways of doing things (as a general rule).
Obviously, if you had the budget you could throw more hardware and bandwidth at the problem and everything would be fine. Since you're asking I'm assumin
xythos or WebDAV (Score:2)
WebDAV integrated with LDAP solved the file attachment problem for us.
xythos is a commercial implementation of WebDAV.
KM (Score:1)
system like Opentext's [opentext.com] Livelink.
We are using it at our office and it works great. It allows sharing files, message boards, project management all from a web interface.
We now don't use email internally any more.
publish/subscribe (Score:2)
Have a look at elvin [dstc.edu.au] for example. You run a publish server, the things you mentioned are instrumented (also apps like CVS [dstc.edu.au]) to publish events, users subscribe to only those events they're interested in and are then notified when these happen. One notification mechanism is tickertape [dstc.edu.au], but there are others of course.
Ralf