The lowest common denominator for any business communication has always been email. You would think it would have died by now, but instead, it’s actually thriving. Information that is often of the highest valuable can usually be found within email, often as attachments or written agreements in the body of the email itself.
Sensitive information with financials advisors, investors, partners, clients, etc., can all be found in your email; which is a really scary thought. Usually, that’s the easiest platform hackers use to infiltrate a company’s private data. Still, the importance that we place on email as a means of communication is so great, that it’s impossible to let it die off; and so we continue to use it as a primary means of communication.
Email is actually a great tool for employees who don’t need to be tech savvy (like support, lead gen, etc), as well as anyone who’s mobile. In many cases, Dropbox sharing, Google Docs sharing, or Evernote notebook sharing is too complicated for employees to learn if they don’t need to use it in order to perform their jobs well. For our mobile team, having all our notes and sales documents in our email makes it easy for us to access these documents on our phones while we’re out meeting clients, and our support tickets can all be handled via a Gmail shared label workflow.
Still, regardless of how great email is, organizations cannot survive with email as their only infrastructure. Businesses need good applications in: project management, sales management, note-taking, etc. The biggest problem lies in tying all these isolated applications together so that everyone can be on the same page for a group effort. There is no such suite that offers everything a business needs; perhaps Google and Microsoft are the only 2 platforms that come close, but still lack diversity in their offerings.
How Do You Integrate Email as Part of Your Cloud Infrastructure?
Let’s suppose that you are using Evernote to keep track of your projects (notes, images, etc.), but your primary method of communication in your company is via email. Since you’re the only team member using Evernote, you have one major problem: noone on your team will ever understand your point of view because they’ll never adequately know what you’re thinking.
You have one of 2 options:
Option 1)
Change your process and convince everybody that they should use Evernote. Still you must foresee that your company’s information will be scattered between email and Evernote, which is problematic when you need to access important documents quickly.
Option 2)
The easiest solution is to integrate Evernote with email so that team members who only use email can access and edit your Evernote notebook, the same way how you would be able to access and edit their Gmail labels. With cloudHQ, you can accomplish this in 4 easy steps:
- Setup shared label
- Create a sub-folder directly in your Gmail under that shared parent label and name it Evernote
- Use the cloudHQ wizard to sync the two applications
- Done! Anything that you put in your Gmail labels will be synchronized out to your Evernote notebook, and everything from your Evernote notebook will be synchronized with your Gmail labels .
Photo used under Creative Commons from Joe The Goat Farmer