Email attachments are Evil

The road to document management hell is literally paved with email attachments. The bigger the attachment – the smoother the road and the more attachments you send – the sooner you’ll get there…

In my last blog post (in which I extolled the virtues of blogging for project communication instead of using email), I wrote this:

By the way, if any of you out there routinely use attachments to share documents, i implore you to cease and desist. If your corporation doesn’t have a document management strategy, it needs to get into the 21st century, especially since 2009 is likely to favor companies that go after efficiency…

What I should have said was that there should be a good document management strategy. Without explicit rules that drive culture change, encourage behavior that corresponds to long term vision, and discourage behavior that goes against it, the inertia will take you exactly where you already are, which, for all intents and purposes, is akin to going backwards.

Here’s why attachments should be banned, or at least discouraged, by any forward-thinking company (the order isn’t indicative of importance or impact):

1. Email becomes your document management system
2. There’s no security (unless you implement IRM [Information Rights Management], which is even more rare [rarer?] than the jackalope)
3. There is no document versioning
4. There is no change control
5. There’s no access auditing
6. There’s no record retention
7. There’s no metadata management
8. Information contained in the document can’t be discovered (since it’s locked to individual mailboxes/computers, promoting silos)
9. Infrastructure investment is directed towards a mismatched category of IT (communication channels instead of information management)
10. Any investment in a real document management system becomes “money down the drain”, because if you’re emailing documents, clearly you’re not using your “real” document management solution

There are a few other reasons that can be added to my list (inefficient server space usage, additional administrative overhead, clogged mailboxes, reduced performance, and so on), but 10′s a good number, so I’ll stop there.

If you ever dream of liberating useful information out of the prison cells that documents really are, the first step is to end our dependence on email attachments – at least as we know them now…

So, why are we still emailing attachments around? Unfortunately, the answer is simple: it’s too damn convenient. The technology has been around for a long time, the concept has become part of our “collective subconscious”, and the supporting applications (both on the client and the server) have been fine-tuned to near perfection. Anything new is none of the above. Elegant integration with existing corporate email solutions is the real answer to the problem, and, as far as I know (am I wrong?), there’s no such thing out there.

Another reason for email dominance is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. We spend a lot of time in email simply because that’s where our stuff is. That’s where the information lives, that’s where our documents are, et cetera. What if the information no longer lived in email? What if blog posts were how we learned things? Would we still email around so many attachments? Or would we start using email as a notification channel? I think the answer is yes – although I don’t have any corporate examples to back it up.

The real solution to the problem must include three components – server component that is a real document management platform, client software that is aware of the special capabilities of the server, cultural awareness of the attachment problem and an explicit agreement to address it. Those three components can be implemented separately, although in order for a true end-to-attachments to begin, the first two must be well designed and executed.

One (partial) solution I’ve been evangelizing is the consistent use of SharePoint (and DocuShare, where appropriate) as the real repository for documents of any kind, and the sending of links instead of attachments. This is only a partial solution (for several reasons), and even the most progressive of my colleagues will lapse back into attachment addiction when the pressure is high and time is short – and I can’t blame them. The extra steps required to upload a document and then email it, are an impediment to an efficient workflow. This is kind of a brute force solution, in which I taunt, cajole, and preach to bring about behavior change.

Moving information radiation to team/project blogs is another good way to start reducing the number of attachments emailed. As people spend time in blogs, the concept of document uploads becomes much more accessible and easier understood when the familiar “crutch” email tools aren’t under hand to subvert the move of information radiation online.

Who knows, maybe 2009 will be the year email attachments are eradicated?

Email is Evil; Blog your way to the Light side

Coming back from a two week vacation (with a few holidays included in that span), i was greeted by 250 new email messages. I’m sure that’s on the lower end of the scale for some folks, although for me it’s a fair amount, even if about 100 of those turned out to be junk. So, i have 140 new, content-full, meaningful, possibly action-requiring, email messages in my inbox, waiting for my review.

Tagging all the emails belonging to this project or that project is a good way to get through the email landfill, as is focusing on the latest threads first and skimming over the rest to find offshoots & branches that didn’t quite develop into anything. Still, it took me a good 3 hours to go through all the updates and figure out where things are, after two weeks of not paying attention.

There is, of course, a better way… It does require a bit of a culture change, which immediately makes it an uphill battle, but hear me out.

What if, instead of sending out emails to the team, each individual team member updated (or sent an update email to) the project/team blog? In this beautiful utopian world of mine, all i’d have to do is open up the RSS reader for my project blogs, and have the evolution/storyline of my project unfold in front of my eyes as if i were reading the project’s diary (which, of course, is exactly what i would have been doing). There would have been no need to search my inbox for related messages, no need to waste time identifying messages i’ve already looked through as part of a newer message’s trail, categories would have been applied by authors for easier segmenting, and i probably would have spent less than half the time catching up on all the stuff that happened.

As a side benefit (and a major one), i would have had an online history of the project for all to view – instead of locking that history down in several mailboxen of individual team members. Of course, this history would have been keyword searcheable and could be integrated into project documentation (wiki) to make project data all the richer.

The blogging process can be made easier if the project blog were email-enabled. This way the familiar email becomes a tool in the new information radiation infrastructure, rather than remaining an instrument of information silos and mass document confusion. By the way, if any of you out there routinely use attachments to share document, i implore you to cease and desist. If your corporation doesn’t have a document management strategy, it needs to get into the 21st century, especially since 2009 is likely to favor companies that go after efficiency…