GrexIt

GrexIt brings Shared/Public Folders to Google Apps mail

Shared or Public Folders have been a hugely popular feature in MS Outlook and Exchnage, whereas they have always been absent from Google Apps email. Being able to share email conversations with your colleagues is of great value for most email users, and GrexIt brings this functionality into Google Apps. And its so much better than Shared email Folders as someone familiar with Outlook would know about.

You can view GrexIt as a public folder for your entire company, where you and your colleagues can easily submit conversations at a single click of a button on your email interface. On adding to GrexIt, the whole conversation, along with attachments are added to GrexIt. Not just that, after a conversation is added to GrexIt, GrexIt automatically keeps track of any further messages received on that conversation and pull them into the version of the conversation inside GrexIt.

Shared Labels in GrexIt make it very easy to organize the conversations, and specify Access Controls on them. For instance, you can easily define a label called "Finance" in GrexIt, and give access to that label only to the members of the Finance and Accounts team in your company. After that, as soon as the label "Finance" is applied to a conversation in GrexIt, the access to view that conversation becomes limited to the Finance and Accounts teams. Using Shared Labels, it is very easy to create sections inside GrexIt, accessible only to specific people inside your company.

GrexIt does not stop there, and gives you automation with a feature called Fetch Rules. Using Fetch Rules, you can instruct GrexIt to automatically pick up specific email conversations from the inboxes of people in your company. For example, when your Accounts person adds a label called "Invoice" on a conversation in his inbox, GrexIt can automatically pick it up from his inbox and share it with the Finance and Accounts teams. Future versions of Fetch Rules would support fetching on conversations based on keywords and recepients. Fetch Rules allow you to create a system to automatically pull in useful email conversations and share them with the right people in your company.

GrexIt is the easiest way for you and your team to share and archive useful email communication. Sign up now at http://grexit.com.

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!