I have been working for the last couple of months building this tool: www.grexit.com. If you use Google Apps for your email, you’ll most likely find it useful. A small description of where we are trying to get at with GrexIt follows (It uses a browser plugin that we currently build only for FF 3.x):
This is what you can do with GrexIt:
- When you have an email thread in your inbox that you think can be of importance/relevance to other people you work with, now or sometime in the future, you can add the email thread to GrexIt by pressing the “Send to GrexIt” button on your email interface.
- This also triggers an email to all participants of the email discussion. You can continue your discussion on email by responding to this automatically triggered mail, and the complete discussion keeps getting saved in GrexIt.
- You can search the content on GrexIt by typing in the box that is rendered just above your chat box in Gmail/GoogleApps mail.
- You can also login to GrexIt at http://grexit.com and access the content that your group has added.
How to use GrexIt: http://blog.grexit.com/using-grexit
The kind of content for which GrexIt is relevant (some generic points):
- Technical set-up/configuration information that might be needed later by anyone in the team
- Announcements that might be of relevance to people who join the team later
- Discussions where someone asked a question and the problem got resolved on email
- Links to articles etc. on the internet which might be useful later – example: all the gang discussions that we have
- As a thumb-rule, anything in your inbox that you think might be needed by others now/later, belongs in GrexIt
Currently, the plugin works only on FF 3.x and is for Google Apps users. Also, you might see some problems with the attachment support as of now. We’re working to fix it.
Would look forward to knowing from the community here what they think about the tool. A lot of features, including gmail like labels, but shared within the group, are coming soon.
- CC is Evil - June 24, 2011
- Launching GrexIt – Your shared email memory - August 17, 2010
- Enterprise Collaboration tools: Adoption and Benefits? - December 10, 2008
Hi Abhishek,
Thanks for the encouraging words.
Not tags, you can add labels, just like Gmail, but with a difference – GrexIt’s labels are shared labels, so if one person of the group adds a label to a discussion, other members can see it to. We found it to be a nice and open way of collaborating.
About labels on our blog: http://blog.grexit.com/grexit-gets-labels
A few ways of using GrexIt:
Create a knowledge base out of day to day email communication: http://blog.grexit.com/using-grexit-create-a-knowledge-base-out-of-e
Make announcements on email in a better way: http://blog.grexit.com/using-grexit-announcements
Support for all browsers is coming soon, and support for Outlook and Thunderbird will come in 4-6 months.
Hope you use GrexIt and like it 🙂
Thanks,
-Niraj
—
Twitter: nirajr | mail: niraj AT grexit DOT com
Niraj,
I love this. Can you also let users add tags to the convos?
What to me seems like the major benefit is that grexit can organically create an archive of organization knowledge and discussions that so freely flow on email.
And email groups could definitely use the future versions to create ‘sticky posts’.
Perhaps I don’t understand grexit fully! But regardless, great UI and good luck!
cheers
Sachin, the idea is that the email conversation can be relevant to people who were not part of the discussion (maybe they were not in CC/To, or joined the company later). They should be able to find it from somewhere.
Chandra, essentially yes. But problems with forwarding to a mailing-group:
-> The discussion loses its structure. It does not show up as individual chronological messages.
-> What about follow-up messages on that thread.
-> You lose attachments.
-> You lose access controls (which you’ll get very soon with GrexIt)
-> GrexIt gives you the ability to organize your content using shared labels.
-> GrexIt fits very well with the Google Apps mail experience, leading to better user uptake. We all know forwarding to a group can help solve this problem – but how many of us have actually done it. Thats because its not intuitive/easy.
Thanks,
-Niraj
Why not simply forward that mail to a mailing-group? That solves the problem of archiving + sharing the mail for further reference.
How is this more helpful than adding others in the email CC list? They all get the email which is searchable and they will all get all future emails in that thread. Did I miss something important that GrexIT adds?