Central Desktop Discussions are a feature that bridges the gap between using email and user forums.
As you know, email is a great way to communicate with people in your office or outside of your office, such as customers, clients and partners. It works much faster than snail mail and keeps a much better record of conversations than the phone or fax machines. Sometimes you want to pull in more than a few people into an email “thread” to discuss upcoming meeting plans, processes or a key account. Again, this is a great way to communicate, but some issues that you can run into are people getting left out the loop (when someone uses “reply” instead of “reply all”) or being unable to locate old email discussions that you want to reference again. If you are anything like me, you receive and respond to a lot of email everyday- and these can really start to build up after awhile if you like to save your correspondence to refer back to it.
User Forums are a great way to discuss topics within a web environment. People can easily view information and discuss topics inside of various categories. Unlike Email the threads are easily referred back to and no one gets left out of the loop. The only problem is, people have to log in to them to take part in the discussed topics. This means replies can sometimes take a long time to be created because people may not remember to check in, or just not really have the time to do so.
So, as you can see here the gap that requires a bridge has a bunch of people looking for old emails or getting left out of the loop on one end and people trying to foster faster communication on the other end.
What if we went ahead and bridged that gap and gave you a tool that would allow you to take advantage of the best of both worlds? Let’s take a look at Central Desktop Discussions. This allows you to still have your discussions take place by email, just like you are used to doing – with the advantage of everything being logged into Central Desktop for easy searching and reference. This allows you to have your discussions assigned to a workspace or project, allows for greater transparency and makes sure that no one gets left out of the loop.
A question I get asked a lot is “When should I use a discussion instead of just creating an email?”. That is a great question. My general rule is that if the subject matter of the discussion is related to a project or a department and will need to have more than 3 people in the loop – always make it a Central Desktop discussion. Examples would be planning department meetings or discussing deployment plans related to a client project. You may want to reference those discussions again. If the subject matter involves involves lunch plans or a notice that you are arriving late for a meeting – send it by regular email. Chances are you do not need to go back and look at what you chose for lunch last November 13th.
Alright – so now we know the benefits of using CD Discussions and we know when not to use CD Discussions. Now – let’s take a look at how EASY these are to use.
When you want to start a Discussion follow this path: Login > My Workspaces > Workspace > Files & Discussions > go to the folder that you would like to house the discussion in > Click “New Discussion” > Add the Subject > Add your text and any attachments using the WYSIWYG editor > and then choose who you want to have take part in the Discussion > Click the “Start This Discussion” button and away it goes!
Each person that you chose to take part in the Discussion will receive an email of the Discussion. It is also now inside of Central Desktop. If you are already logged into Central Desktop you can always reply to the Discussion thread right inside of the workspace. However, most of us live inside of Outlook or other email client all of the time – for those of us – we can read and reply to the Discussion just by opening the email, clicking reply, adding the reply and clicking “Send”. The reply will then be sent out to those taking part in the Discussion as well as logged in Central Desktop.
It is that easy! And once you dive in and start to use it and experiencing the benefits of being able to recall information quickly, have it tied to projects and not getting left out of the replies – you will look back at using standard email in the same way as we look at using the Telegraph or Fax Machine now.
Enjoy!
Tags: Discussions
