Folders vs. Tags For Shared Email Accounts? 148
binarybum writes "I run a student organization with a 10-member 'board of directors.' We hardly ever all have time to attend meetings and a large part of how we interact with the student body is through email. We have a shared email account (accessible by the 10 of us on the board) right now that is typically accessed through an outlook web-access portal. We've been attempting to keep things organized in the account through a complex collection of folders that have been tacked on ad libum. It's turned into a complete mess. I have the onerous task of restructuring the folder system in hopes of achieving sustainable organization, but I'm wondering if I should just switch us over to a tagging system — perhaps Gmail. Has anyone used tags for a multi-user account successfully or does it end up being just as messy?"
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Somewhat the same situation here (Score:1, Interesting)
Suggestion (Score:5, Interesting)
Tags: Good; Another Idea? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's another idea you might, or might not, like:
Use GMail, or similar, for a group of accounts, one of which is the main, public address. This main account auto-forwards to the 10 member accounts, much like a list-serve. Replies from a member are CC'ed to the main account (set the rules right, or you could end up with an endless loop!!) and the 'Reply To:' field from the members is to the main account. This way, everybody gets everything, the group account is still the focal point, and everybody is responsible for keeping their own account organized.
If a single person is responsible for all of this (you?), you can set it up such that you are the one who can make changes to all the accounts and the others only have emailing privileges (but I haven't thought this part out and it may be difficult with some systems). One thing to consider if you use this is to either have an agreement (which some will break) or a setup that does not allow the users to use this account setup with out the CC'ing. This prevents them from using the account for personal or nefarious reasons.
You have a broken culture (Score:5, Interesting)
The secretary's job is not just the completion of the minutes. But to organize and forward on information that is required for the board. Information that is supposed to represent the boards point of view should go through the same single point.
Ad hoc access to, filtering of, replying to and otherwise manipulating the email is broken. One of the symptoms of that brokenness is the problem you are seeing now.
Fix the culture, the rest will follow.
Re:Use a group (Score:2, Interesting)
Advice from another student group (Score:2, Interesting)
The point: I highly recommend going with Google: Gmail+chat, Google Docs, Calendar, and Google groups (which I use heavily in another student group). You could have your group e-mail automatically forward to each person, or you can have your group email be a Google Groups email address.
The major draw back of this approach: learning curve. Don't underestimate people's desire to keep doing things the way they've always done it. Just adopting a strategy doesn't solve the problem. it's not that people are lazy or dumb. They're just trying to manage their time efficiently. If you want to transition people to a new system, you have to work one-on-one with each person.
Re:Forums (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Go with a mailing list (Score:2, Interesting)
With 10 people on one email account, it's hardly surprising that it turned into a clusterfuck.
Hear, hear!
Corporate emails at my work consist of endless top-posting after re-top-posting that must be read from the bottom to the top to make any sense of the mess. In the process, I need to skip over multiple re-inclusions of the same email, and not get annoyed that the entire mess mostly consists of disclaimers. LookOut seems to strongly encourage this technique of mis-communication.
"What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant disclaimer."
"What is the disclaimer standing on?"
"But it's disclaimers all the way down!" (sorry Stephen Hawking.)