| WSJ Piece |
[Nov. 27th, 2007|06:58 am] |
Email's Friendly Fire
Re: Brownies in the Kitchen!
Too Much 'Colleague Spam'
Inspires New Sorting Tools
By REBECCA BUCKMAN
November 27, 2007; Page B1
Until recently, Mukesh Lulla, president of a networking and security-software company called TeamF1 Inc., spent so much time sorting through emails he received each day that he barely had time to run his business.
"I probably had the highest email load in the company," says Mr. Lulla, who was getting 300 to 400 messages daily -- not counting annoying spam. So a few months ago he downloaded a new software product from a company called ClearContext Corp. that automatically sends some noncritical messages into folders so he doesn't have to see them right away. He can forward other messages to subordinates and receive notifications later if they don't respond. Now "entire conversations automatically go somewhere where I don't see them, until I want to see them," says Mr. Lulla, who says he mentioned the program to others.
QUESTION OF THE DAY
What proportion of the emails you receive at work are actually important to you? Discuss in the WSJ.com forums.Email overload is now considered a much bigger workplace problem than traditional email spam. Inboxes are bulging today partly because of what some are calling "colleague spam" -- that is, too many people are indiscriminately hitting the "reply to all" button or copying too many people on trivial messages, like inviting 100 colleagues to partake of brownies in the kitchen. A good chunk of today's emails are also coming from brand new sources, like social- and business-networking sites like Facebook Inc. and LinkedIn Corp., or text messages forwarded from cellphones.
Unlike previous email-technology companies that only addressed problems like external email spam or offered narrow products that screened messages for certain content, new companies are now springing up to deal with the email-overload problem and help sort the deluge. Silicon Valley start-ups including ClearContext of San Francisco and Seriosity Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., are specifically tackling the problem of internal email overload. Meanwhile, other start-ups like San Francisco's Xobni Corp., are trying to help people better organize and search the email and personal-contact load they already have.
Last year, the average corporate email user received 126 messages a day, up 55% from 2003, according to the Radicati Group, a Palo Alto market research firm. By 2009, workers are expecting to spend 41% of their time just managing emails.
Corporate email accounts, usually managed by Microsoft Corp.'s popular Outlook software, have become a "central repository" for all this new information, says William Kennedy, a Microsoft general manager.
"These people are in pain," says Matt Brezina, the 26-year-old co-founder of Xobni, which has received $4.2 million in funding from venture capitalists. Xobni's product places a set of features on top of a customer's email inbox, such as "profiles" of online contacts complete with photos, and quick links to set up appointments. The nine-person company says it has about 1,000 people globally testing the product -- including salespeople, recruiters and marketing managers who use email frequently -- and expects to release it broadly early next year.
ClearContext, founded in 2003, regularly charges $89.95 for its main software product, which uses algorithms to quickly analyze a user's email to determine which contacts and messages are the most important. A message from someone who is already listed in a user's Outlook contact list, and to whom a user usually responds very quickly (think spouse or boss) is deemed critical and might be marked red.
But messages from others -- say, those who usually include the user in a big group of recipients, and to whom the user doesn't respond often -- might be marked blue or black. The color-coding helps people quickly see which messages they should respond to first. Users can also have certain emails automatically redirected away from the inbox. "If there were an email from the CEO of my division, or the CEO of Honeywell, believe me, that's coming through in purple," says Eric C. Liebeler, a ClearContext user and a lawyer with industrial conglomerate Honeywell International Inc. in St. Louis Park, Minn. Users can pick their own colors for incoming messages and customize the software in other ways.
Some of the new email-management companies have run into snags when corporate information-technology departments forbid individual workers from downloading their software, usually because of security concerns. But many companies don't restrict such downloads, says Deva Hazarika, ClearContext's chief executive.
Mr. Liebeler uses other ClearContext functions, such as one to quickly archive important messages and create audit trails. The software lets him hit one button on a message to move it to a folder holding documents related to a specific case, rather than having to manually drag and drop the message with a computer mouse.
Of course, tools like ClearContext's assume that people using them are already fairly organized and prone to filing their messages away, instead of just letting them pile up, says Microsoft's Mr. Kennedy. Outlook tries to "appeal to a broad range of work styles," he says. It recognizes the people Microsoft calls email "filers" as well as the "pilers." Filers strive to have an empty inbox by the end of the day, while pilers "are the super-messy desk people. They've got 5,000 items in their inbox, most of them unread," says Mr. Kennedy.
For disorganized pilers, Microsoft recently added a better search feature to Outlook, so people can search through bulky folders or inboxes to find a particular message or document. Mr. Kennedy says Microsoft also encourages other companies to build more-targeted email products on top of Outlook, since it "makes our solutions even more sticky and valuable in the workplace."
But integrating new email software with Outlook isn't easy. That's what Seriosity discovered earlier this year when a group of eight workers in eBay Inc.'s information-technology department started testing Seriosity's product.
Thad Lyon, eBay's manager for enterprise infrastructure, says he and his team liked the software, which tries to get people to send fewer messages, or just more relevant ones, by allocating them a "virtual currency" and asking users to assign a value to each message sent. A message asking someone if he or she wants to go out for lunch might carry a value of three "serios" of virtual currency; a message about an important customer with an urgent problem might get 30 serios. Users get 100 serios at the start of week, but they also receive serios when others send them messages.
But, Mr. Lyon says, Seriosity's software slowed down some users' email so much that eBay had to stop using it. Seriosity's president and CEO, Simon Roy, says eBay's problems with the product were unique, but that Seriosity's software plug-in for Outlook "wasn't as fast as we would have liked, and we are improving that" based on customer feedback. A basic version of Seriosity, expected to be available early next year, will be free, the company says, but premium data and other services will cost money; the company hasn't yet announced fees.
Mr. Lyon says he's looking forward to it, since the email glut "is not going to go away." |
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