Communication Tracker

We are moving, changing, growing

Posted by Ashish Belagali on February 5, 2013 Comments Off

Firstly, our warmest new year wishes to our readers.

Shiney New Kommbox will replace Communication Tracker

We have been silent on the blog for a while, but we are neck-deep into work. We have been preparing for a move from Communication Tracker to Kommbox. Let me give you a quick peep into what’s going into this transition and what you expect.

‘Communication Tracker’ has been a slightly longish name. We were on the lookout for an alternative, but the alternative took its time to present itself. We wanted to find something that’s appropriate, crisp, has a good sound to it and its URL is available. Finally, we have zeroed in on the new name — kommbox. It rhymes with mailbox (which it makes redundant), and it can be interpreted as either a ‘common box’ or a ‘communication box’. The K instead of C gives it a style — don’t you think? Hope you also like our new logo.

We also decided that the transition from Communication Tracker to Kommbox should not be just a name change. Kommbox should build upon the foundation provided by Communication Tracker features, and that’s what we have been working on. Kommbox will bring about a good number of feature enhancements over Communication Tracker –while still keeping it simple and intuitive as before– along with a sexy User Interface. We are also changing the pricing model. In short, kommbox will be a new beast, much different from Communication Tracker. We are confident that the users of Communication Tracker will love the all new shiny kommbox.

The move has already started. The Communication Tracker application was moved to legacy.kommbox.com a few days ago. The existing users will get the new kommbox enhancements in a few days. Our twitter handle and logo has changed too.

To make sure that you don’t miss the action, visit kommbox.com and drop your email id there. We will then let you know as soon as the new kommbox goes live! Also, follow us on twitter at @kommbox.

A Reason for SMEs to Smile

Posted by Ashish Belagali on June 9, 2012 Comments Off

We have revised the prices of the hosted Communication Tracker to make it very attractive to the SME segment.

Salient highlights are:

(1) The new FREE plan is not time bound, so many businesses may keep using Communication Tracker free of cost for long time.

(2) There is a $25/mo plan, which is going to be very affordable to the SME segment.

(3) Finally, the limits on the $125/mo plan have been raised.

Please check the Plans and Pricing page for details.

About Communication Tracker:

Communication Tracker is a tool to improve the communication management of a company. In particular, it does it by providing a central storage of communication as opposed to storing it all over scattered and individually-controlled mailboxes.

What’s up with Enterprise 2.0

Posted by Ashish Belagali on May 26, 2012 Comments Off

Since Web 2.0 is largely successful in collaborating all over the world (facebook, twitter, youtube), Enterprise 2.0 is an attempt to replicate this success within the boundaries of the enterprise.

Another related buzzwords that exist are ‘Facebook for the enterprise’ or ‘Social intranet’.

As with Web 2.0, the specific offerings in Enterprise 2.0 are going to be vastly different from one another and they will keep redefining what Enterprise 2.0 means. While this redefinition happens, any attempts to confine Enterprise 2.0 to a single set of features are bound to be incomplete. As a parallel in Web 2.0 world, nobody would have included microblogging in Web 2.0 before twitter came in.

Observers expected Enterprise 2.0 to make it big right after Web 2.0, but that has NOT happened. This is because the collaboration inside corporate walls is expected to be different from that in the free online world. Some proponents of Enterprise 2.0 have tried to take the philosophies of Web 2.0 to be imposed on to corporates, and it does not work like that. It has evolved that it’s a far better idea to provide tools that do not contrast a corporation’s existing ways / processes / hierarchies.

Through experimentation, Enterprise 2.0 has kept discovering and rediscovering itself.

Was Sally Really Pregnant?

Posted by Ashish Belagali on April 19, 2012 1 comment

Carl was fuming over coffee: “I am pulling my hair over whether Sally was pregnant 3 years ago. Sally does not even work with us any more, and all this is an unnecessary bother.”

“Oh”, I kept silent, knowing there was more to come.

“Boss is after me. And why wouldn’t he be? He was muttering that there was some lawsuite over her leave records and he must get a clear answer quickly.” Carl continued, “I remember that there were conflicting medical reports, and so there was a lengthy discussion over this. People were clearly divided, and now –after all these years– suddenly it’s important to find out what was the last word on that.”

“You must be having all the emails, don’t you?” I asked.

“That’s what my boss says too. He does not understand that it’s very difficult to keep track of discussion threads over email. You know that the email client uses the subject line to identify threads, and it fails when people change the subject lines. It’s difficult to say for sure that all the relevant mails are found in the same folder. Some may have been lost over time, some may have gone into the wrong folders.”

“… And some would not have even reached you if someone did not copy you in the conversation”, I added.

“Exactly!” Carl screamed, “How in the world can anyone be expected to keep track of the communication trail that happened so long ago? It’s just insane. Who would have thought that this Sally would create trouble 3 years down the line?”

…

While the above story is fictitious, the problem is for real. Of course, tt’s not always Sally — sometimes it’s a past invoice that was sent out that you need to hunt, sometimes it’s the login credentials that you received from your vendor, and other times it could be something else. These issues do suck up your productive time and leave you exhausted and frustrated at the end of the day.

One may argue that if one was well-organized with one’s emails then it would be a non-issue. That’s not correct, however. Automatically fired email rules have limited applicability, and therefore one has to be disciplined enough to manually organize one’s mailbox. With hundreds of emails flooding the inbox on a daily basis, the time that it takes for organizing mailbox is not trivial. Further, do you really expect everyone around you to be disciplined and organized? Those who are not are invariably going to keep troubling others for finding past emails.

It all means loss of efficiency for an organization.

What’s the solution? It is to move the communication storage in a central location where concerned people can access it. Discussion threads need to be maintained in this central storage. Therefore, when one replies to a message, the reply stays in the same thread as the original message — and this thread is now available to everyone at this central place without calling for any disciplined or organized behavior on their part.

If Carl’s company used such a system, then Carl could have browsed through the last 2-3 messages in the relevant thread to find what he needs in less time than it took him to finish his coffee. Maybe his boss could have given him a pat on the back for sorting out such a sensitive issue with ease. Or, maybe, his boss would have checked it himself without bothering Carl in the first place.

What do you think would have happened? Write it in your reply.

User Engagement in Communication Tracker 4.0

Posted by Ashish Belagali on April 13, 2012 1 comment

We are glad to release Communication Tracker 4.0 today. Release 4.0 is a major update over previous release 3.7, and is thus a milestone for Communication Tracker.

User Engagement is the theme of Communication Tracker 4. Users can keep open the Dashboard view on their browsers as they carry out their work, and any updates get instantly conveyed to them in the newly added Timeline on the Dashboard page.

As shown in the figure, on the Dashboard view, we now see addition of the Timeline, which is collapsed by default. Once expanded, it gives recent updates across all projects relevant to you in a chronological order. Like some social networking sites, if there are new unfetched updates then an unobtrusive notification comes up. (The count also gets added to the page title.) You can click on it to fetch these new updates.

You can thank someone else for the updates, using the green-colored ‘Thank you’ button right next to the update. You also get to see how many people have thanked this update. With this, it has become easy to thank others for their good work, and similarly be thanked by others for your good work. The ‘Thank you’ feature increases the positive energy and enables social collaboration for the closed groups of insiders and outsiders in the ecosystem of an organization. There are couple of rules that may be obvious: You cannot thank an update twice, and you cannot thank yourself for an update.

The count of Thanks one receives is shown in the header, and is thus visible from all the pages. One can click on it to know more details.

The same Thank you button also appears on the Discussion and Task pages, so that one can thank from there.

Apart from the User Engagement features, there are other minor enhancements / bug fixes that have gone into Communication Tracker 4.0. The new release is automatically available to everyone using our hosted instance.

We have also revamped our website also along with this 4.0 release. Noteworthy is a demo test bed where one may try full-featured Communication Tracker even without signing up.

The team has worked hard to make it happen, and we hope that our users like it too. As usual, please send comments / suggestions / defects to support@communication-tracker.com.

Software — The Value of Ease or Use

Posted by Ashish Belagali on March 23, 2012 1 comment

Roughly 4 decades ago, an Easy-to-Use Operating System awkwardly made its way into the room full of operating systems that were basking in glory of their sophisticated multi-threading and multi-user-management capabilities. The awkward newcomer had none of these shiny features, but it was sold with a cheaper computer. There was no reason for the others to give the junior a second glance.

This operating system was MS-DOS, which turned out to be the greatest breakthrough for Microsoft — then a small company. As everyone knows, in a matter of a few short years, it started giving the stalwarts a run for their money.

How did MS-DOS cut it? Agreed — it was on a cheaper platform and therefore was affordable for some who could not afford the existing solutions. But what drove its quick adoption was its ease of use. The ‘dir’ command with only 3 options (and default serving the most needed use case) was much easier to master than ‘ls’ with its 14+ options (the default showing just the names of the files — ouch! Do I need to learn the options to see the file size or the update-time?)

It’s important to note that, unlike many other ‘cheap’ solutions, most users did not loath MS-DOS and look for the first opportunity to graduate out of it; but they became die-hard fans who persuaded others to go for MS-DOS based solutions.

Such is the power of the ease of use. Users value an easy-to-use simple-looking software that delivers the job much more than another complex software loaded with tonnes of features. MS-DOS is just one representative story and there are countless others. As we learn from this story, with a easy-to-use software:

Users are productive with minimal learning curve – working is intuitive
The default settings serve the most common use cases
The software communicates back to the users any important happenings

Communication Tracker design tries to abide by the ease-of-use principles. We keep out anything that can make it complicated for its end users.

What’s your take on the usability of software? Please write a comment to let me know. Have you tried using Communication Tracker? (If not, go sign up now — it’s free) How has your experience been? Please let us know if you face any hiccups. As we prepare for release 4, we would want to take those out.

Communication Tracker 3.7 is Out!

Posted by Ashish Belagali on March 6, 2012 2 comments

We are happy to release Communication Tracker 3.7 today. Two key features in this release are given below.

(1) Task Issue Indicators on My Tasks Page

Instead of showing a single line ‘Ahead of Schedule’ or ‘Behind Schedule’ under the task progress bar, Communication Tracker introduces ‘Task Issue Indicators’ that are shown against the tasks. The indicators come in 3 sizes, to indicate the magnitude of the issue. Following 3 types of issues are tracked:

Task is delayed past its due date
Task is running behind schedule
Effort overrun that indicates burning more effort than the estimated effort

As shown in the diagram, the image tooltip gives you the details of the issue.

These indicators are shown for both tasks which are waiting for the logged in user, and those that are assigned by the logged in user.

(2) Remember User

If you click on a message or task link in an email notification, you would expect to be taken directly to the message or the task. This could be hindered if your previous session timed out, and you had to go through the login process again. Our users told us that this is a pain area, and it is fixed in this release. Communication Tracker now remembers your login indefinitely and you are not timed out. (You may manually log out, of course). Thus, your login is remembered on your computer (your browser, to be precise), and you will directly be taken to the task or the message without the the login page coming in the way.

Apart from these two, there are many more minor enhancements / defect fixes in this release. Notable among these are some cross-browser issues that were observed in the previous release.

How to Assess People’s Ability to Collaborate

Posted by Ashish Belagali on February 28, 2012 1 comment

Will collaboration be successful in your organization? The most important factors is the people. Some people can collaborate better, while other cannot. Here is a tool to assess this ability of your employees to collaborate.

	Beginning 1	Developing 2	Accomplished 3	Exemplary 4	Score
Contribute
Research & Gather Information	Does not collect any information that relates to the topic.	Collects very little information–some relates to the topic.	Collects some basic information–most relates to the topic.	Collects a great deal of information–all relates to the topic.
Share Information	Does not relay any information to teammates.	Relays very little information–some relates to the topic.	Relays some basic information–most relates to the topic.	Relays a great deal of information–all relates to the topic.
Be Punctual	Does not complete assigned work.	Delays most work.	Most work is completed on time.	Always completes work on time.
Take Responsibility
Fulfill Team Role’s Duties	Does not perform any duties of assigned team role.	Performs very little duties.	Performs nearly all duties.	Performs all duties of assigned team role.
Participate in Online / Offline Meetings	Does not speak during the meetings.	Either gives too little information or information which is irrelevant to topic.	Offers some information–most is relevant.	Offers a fair amount of important information–all is relevant.
Share Equally	Always relies on others to do the work.	Rarely does the assigned work–often needs reminding.	Usually does the assigned work–rarely needs reminding.	Always does the assigned work without having to be reminded.
Value Others’ Viewpoints
Listen to Other Teammates	Is always talking–never allows anyone else to speak.	Usually doing most of the talking–rarely allows others to speak.	Listens, but sometimes talks too much.	Listens and speaks a fair amount.
Cooperate with Teammates	Usually argues with teammates.	Sometimes argues.	Rarely argues.	Never argues with teammates.
Make Fair Decisions	Usually wants to have things their way.	Often sides with friends instead of considering all views.	Usually considers all views.	Always helps team to reach a fair decision.
				Total

Credit:

This tool is a derivative of the Collaboration Rubric found on the San Diego State University site, tweaked to apply to the business professionals instead of students.

What People Want in Email – Survey Results

Posted by Ashish Belagali on February 1, 2012 1 comment

We recently conducted a survey on Facebook – “As far your email communication is concerned, what would you like to have most?” In this post we show the results and offer our own analysis.

The Results

Analysis of the Results

Email spam is the biggest issue on people’s minds. It’s not surprising because when spam came down to be the lowest, it was still at 70% of the total email traffic. Some corporates claim that they have the best spam filters and no longer have a spam problem, yet there was a recent report of a corporate stopping the use of email altogether. Acknowledging that the count of useless emails can go up by factors other than spam — like people copying emails unnecessarily — this contribution is still not expected to be as high as reported by reseachers. This basically leaves out the spam to cause all the menace, and the results are congruent with that.

People are also spending way too much time in organizing their emails into folders manually, which is indicated by #2. Most modern email clients offer the users the ability to create rules which can aid in folder management. Yet, these rules cannot make it completely automated and a non-trivial amount of manual effort is still needed.

Voice mail integration was a nice contribution that we got to this list and it was quickly voted up by the other respondents. It is not about merely adding an audio recording as attachment to an email; but it’s about talking to the computer which, like a steno, takes your dictation. Indeed, it will be a boon when computers start deciphering human words; but for now, given the state of the art on speech recognition, this has the potential to remain on the wish list for long.

Out of the remaining items, there are two related items – people want to see the statistics about how quick people respond, and people also want prompt reply to their sent mail. The later is to do with people’s habits, but we believe that once we have meaningful measurement in place, the responsiveness of people will automatically improve.

Finally, the survey results also show that the Communication Tracker team is on the right track in understanding the real needs and implementing solutions to those. Communication Tracker already addresses many of these needs — thus becoming a better solution than email (yet integrating well with email).

Your Opinion?

We would like to hear from you – do you agree with our understanding? Do you have another take on these results? Please write back.

Collaboration: Short Term vs Long Term

Posted by Ashish Belagali on January 27, 2012 3 comments

Most collaboration tools that are available today have their eyes set on the short term collaboration. They aim to offer great ways to enable
audio / video / text chat and to store these for future reference.

Maybe in the really short term, while it all is very current, there may be a case to refer to the lengthy chat logs.
But in the long run, all that we would like to find is a 4 line summary that captures the key points. The summary is a great way of record-keeping also because text is more amenable to search than audio or video files — even if storage space were not a consideration.

Thus, the focus of collaboration tools would be different if they took the long term perspective. They would care more for the 4 line summary than the huge audio / video logs.

This probably happens because we visualize the word collaboration to mean real-time or near-real-time interaction. But it does not have to be so. Collaboration can, and does, already happen over long term — when people examine decisions taken in the past and have something to say on that.

The focus area of Communication Tracker is the long term collaboration. We believe that existing IM / Audio / Video chat tools are good enough for their job and we do not have to reinvent the wheel by replicating this functionality. We are happy to offer a way to store the communication for your collaboration needs over a long term, and make it easily searchable.

The long communication needs to survive change of hands, and this use case is also handled by Communication Tracker beautifully. When someone leaves, you do not have to wade through her mailbox for important communication, if the important communication is already stored in Communication Tracker safely. Similarly, when you have someone new joining your team, just by giving her access to the relevant Projects (a 1 minute act). the admin can let her in on all the past and future communication that matters.