Just read a post which says that most of the Sharepoint customers use it primarily for file sharing. One may claim that it’s an underuse of such a profound tool. Are the customers fools to have wasted so much money for such a basic need?

It’s a well known fact that most users will use a program with its default settings. For this reason, the feature set of a software needs to be available out of the box, as far as possible. The programmers may take pride in creating a highly configurable piece of software, but it may place a lot of responsibility on the customers. It may be okay in some cases (like an ERP implementation) not okay in most others.

So, is communication within corporates really a complex problem to solve, that it would require ERP-like configuration? Or, are we making mountain out of a molehill here? Further, suppose for a moment that some company X actually has very profound needs of communication. In that case, isn’t there a high probability that by the time you are finished doing the configuration you require some change to it?

Our take is that the communication needs are inherently very simple, and simple solutions like Communication Tracker or Asana have a better chance of being helpful out of the box and addressing those needs. The learning curve is almost zero. Communication Tracker plays well with established user habits, by allowing the users to reply to their email from their email software as they did before, and capture these replies. The use of familiar Red-Yellow-Green signal colors gives a powerful way of expression, which can be captured on the dashboard as a indicator of the health of communications.