GrexIt

Gillingdod.com: We plan to use GrexIt to replace Exchange Public Folders on Google Apps

Gillingdod

We listed on the Google Apps marketplace 3 months back, and the response to GrexIt that we've seen from Google Apps users has been extremely encouraging. GrexIt's easy email sharing functionality is being used daily by hundreds of Google Apps users to add value to their project management, HR, sales, operations and support processes. We're constantly engaging closely with all companies using GrexIt to see what they find useful about GrexIt, and what they would like to improve and build in the next few months.

We recently talked to Carl from Gillingdod, a leading Architectural consultancy firm in the UK. Carl is the IT manager for Gillingdod. Gillingdod recently moved from MS Exchange based email to Google Apps, and started using GrexIt a couple of months back. Carl tells us that Gillingdod is using GrexIt as a replacement for the Exchange Public folders functionality, for which they could not find any other alternative in the Google Apps eco-system. Gillingdod has been using Public Folders to store a share a lot of their useful email communication, and being able to find this functionality after switching to Google Apps is very important to them.

GrexIt has enabled Gillingdod to easily share useful emails with team members right from inside the Google Apps email accounts using our contextual gadget and Fetch Rules features. Carl is now looking for easy ways to export their existing Public Folders content from their old Microsoft Exhange setup to GrexIt, which are still preserved and accessed from user's Outlook clients. We understand that it must be pretty painful to access the old Public Folders content from Outlook, while going to GrexIt for the content that has been shared after the company moved to Google Apps and deployed GrexIt.

We're currently working on a few ways for GrexIt users to easily export public folders content from the Exchange/Outlook GrexIt, and hope to release something by the end of January 2012. Watch this space for details, and thanks again Carl, for talking to us.

Why its hard to tap email inboxes for Knowledge

We have, right from the day we started conceptualizing and developing the idea behind GrexIt, been very sure that GrexIt has to be a tool focused on helping people at organizations tap the knowledge and information hidden in email inboxes. We have, over the last 12 months, built GrexIt feature by feature into a tool that is designed ground-up to help people do exactly that.

Whats so hard about it, you may ask. Well, we have come to understand that a product that helps you tap knowledge from emails has to be very different from a document repository or a collaborative tool like project management software. We're outlining our key learnings about this problem which make it very unique.

  • Conversations are important, not just messages or parts of them: Most of the time, it is the complete conversation which must be preserved and archived for people who read them to understand the context and derive any value out of it. This makes it very important for the tool to be able to track conversations as they happen after it has been saved once.
  • Duplication can easily happen: Multiple people who were a part of an email conversation might save the conversation, leading to duplication and clutter. The tool must have the capability to detect and avoid duplication.
  • Attachments are important: Any tool that helps tap knowledge from emails must handle file attachments cleanly. Attachments contain a lot of valuation information, and must be well organized, categorized and searchable.
  • Contacts are information: Even the email ids of the people involved in a conversation are usually useful information. The contacts might be customers, vendors etc., or might even help discover who are the experts on a specific subject. The tool must grab the contacts in email conversations and store them in such a manner so as to make them available for further use.
  • Access Controls must be well implemented: Since a lot of emails contain private and sensitive information not fit to be accessed by everyone in a company, it should be very easy and intuitive to apply access controls on the email conversations saved.
All of the above, and a lot more has gone into how we've designed GrexIt. If you are on Google Apps, sign up for our private Beta at http://grexit.com. It might just save your life!