August 23, 2016
In 1972, email was invented by a man named Ray Tomlinson, a contractor working on the military ARPANET project which created the internet. Now forty-four years later, email is at the end of its ropes. In both business and personal settings, new alternatives are quickly making email obsolete. Personal correspondence over email is unwieldy compared to social media. Individuals can find a much more efficient platform in Facebook or Twitter when trying to message their friends. Email is more entrenched on the business side, but the rise of cutting-edge collaboration solutions, such as Cisco WebEx Teams, is going to all but completely replace email in the not too distant future. Here’s how.
The Inbox vs. the WebEx Teams: Can You Replace Email?
Take a hard look at your inbox. How valuable is it? Can you actually achieve “Inbox 0”? Does your Outlook look like an endless stream of timestamps, or are you somewhere in between? Below, we take a look at some of the most common uses for your email and how Cisco WebEx Teams can yield the same results with less hassle.
- Staying Up-to-Date on Projects: Most people organize projects with an assortment of folders, Office files, and emails. Normally for any changes made to the project, an in-person meeting or email will need to be used to distribute the updates to the team. On the user side, staying up-to-date on projects means Outlook folders or scanning through the inbox looking for a certain email.
- WebEx Teams: Here is where Teams radically diverges from standard email operations. Instead of a general inbox or collection of folders with emails relevant to projects, WebEx Teams users create specific spaces for every project they’re involved in. These rooms serve as a communal meeting space to share messages, upload files, record meetings, and more. Those project related emails that once littered your inbox are now organized in their respective rooms. The forest and the trees of your project can be viewed in a single location.
- Non-Urgent Messaging: One of the best qualities of email is your ability to send a quick simple, non-urgent message to a coworker that they can read at their leisure.
- WebEx Teams: You can do the same thing, but these messages can be placed into relevant meeting rooms where the focus of the discussion is as wide or as narrow as you require. If you need to send a quick update on a marketing project, reply in that specific meeting room. If a more general message is required, a “Marketing Department” room can be used.
- SPAM Filtering: Emails seem to have a kind of maturity rate that needs to be maintained. The longer an email address is in use, the more subscriptions, unwanted messages, and SPAM it will accrue on a regular basis. This kind of messaging drags down your productivity, obscures important messages, and increases inbox clutter.
- WebEx Teams: Teams is able to segment your business communications. With Teams, your internal and external communications no longer need to occupy the same space.
Cisco WebEx Teams: A Change in Thinking
We’re spoiled in the technology industry. We’re all so used to change—even radical change—that we’re accustomed to dropping obsolete methods for new solutions. The rest of the business world is not as willing to pivot so quickly. Letting go of email requires exactly the kind of change many professionals are going to be unwilling to do at first. Switching from an email-based approach to one that utilizes Cisco requires a fundamental shift in how coworkers interact, but at the end of the day, it is more efficient to use Cisco WebEx Teams.
In the future, we envision users conducting the vast majority of their internal communication within Teams’ spaces or through Chat applications like Cisco Jabber. Email will be relegated to external communications and as a repository for blog alerts, messages to those outside the organization, and marketing materials from subscriptions. If email doesn’t entirely go away, it will definitely be dethroned as king of corporate communications.
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About Mindsight
Mindsight, a Chicago IT services provider, is an extension of your team. Our culture is built on transparency and trust, and our team is made up of extraordinary people – the kinds of people you would hire. We have one of the largest expert-level engineering teams delivering the full spectrum of IT services and solutions, from cloud to infrastructure, collaboration to contact center. Our highly-certified engineers and process-oriented excellence have certainly been key to our success. But what really sets us apart is our straightforward and honest approach to every conversation, whether it is for an emerging business or global enterprise. Our customers rely on our thought leadership, responsiveness, and dedication to solving their toughest technology challenges.
