How we access shared documents
How many times have you started to work on a new task or project that required some sort of access to existing files and documents? Probably often! Depending on how far your organization has moved away from individual silos toward more collaborative ways of storing information, there are two main ways to go about this:
Option 1: You go ask your fellow colleagues to send you all the information you need. Eventually, all these files will come in by email and clutter your inbox until you sort out the stuff. Obviously that’s not ideal…
Option 2: You use collaborative file sharing solutions such as Dropbox, Box, or SharePoint (and SharePoint-based derivatives like OneDrive for Business, and more recently Office Groups). They are great tools (apart from the periodic syncing issues that can drive you crazy…) to create systematic folder structures that are designed to outlive not only an individual’s assignment to a project, but entire projects themselves. Depending on the efforts made by those storing their files, they can then easily be retrieved later on by anyone who needs—and is granted—access.
Clearly, the second option is the way to go for modern organizations that rely heavily on team work.
But what about emails?
One question remains, though. What happens to all the emails (team conversations, client specifications etc.) that contain relevant information? Even if your organization is using shared storage systems, the chances are high that emails are still handled in personal mailbox silos.
The process of individually forwarding these items to those who need it does not only kill productivity, it can even kill information: because entire message threads have been swiped out of someone’s inbox in an attempt to tame email overflow, because colleagues have meanwhile quit their job, or simply because you just don’t know exactly who to ask for specific pieces of information you need.
Of course, you can always extract emails’ text content, save them as PDFs, or in the Outlook-proprietary .msg format directly within the file sharing structures used for other documents. But since emails can consist of whole conversation threads that may still receive replies in the future, it is hard to know exactly how and when to file them. Moreover, if multiple people are involved in a conversation, things can get time consuming and messy easily when it comes to saving these emails spread out over several personal inboxes and sent folders.
We have a smart solution for you!
This is exactly where we plan to save you a lot of trouble. Keluro is a web app capable of storing all these emails, including their attachments, in a new and smart way. You can share any email directly from your Outlook mailbox to a specific #channel, much like you would save your slides and spreadsheets in the appropriate folders. Channels are set up to give specific people such as a project team or your whole organization access to what is shared in there.
Keluro’s algorithms can automatically detect related messages belonging to the same conversation or a similar topic in your mailbox, and thus actively make suggestions to share another particular message with your teams. Moreover, we determine whether a message is part of a “single-threaded” conversation or has been forwarded and interacted with by more than two persons. With these relations visualized, you can easily see what and how things are connected—even if the email in question is several months old and you need to quickly catch up with what was going on.
Give it a try to find out how our app can help you manage email more efficiently and focus on your core business!
