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Here's the situation: you've got a small office of 8-20 employees who work in a consulting business and whose main products/deliverables are reports, spreadsheets, occasional CAD drawings, Gantt charts, project plans, and the like. Not only do they produce those things, they receive reports for which they produce comments/observations. Much of what they produce is collaborative or iterative (ie, not necessarily 'live editing' of spreadsheets, but several people must all contribute to a doc over the space of a week or so). To do so, they need efficient means of communication, discussion, versioning, etc.
Needs: document repository, shared editing of many types of documents, a messaging system for internal office communication, "sharing" system that permits clients to upload or download large files, a managed-content "front page" web site, an internal intranet, shared calendars, contacts lists, some sort of system to produce and maintain office policies and procedures, and otherwise manage internal communications and office admin. Some considerations for discussion, so I'm intentionally not specifying: (1) ideally, systems are usable by different OSes. Obviously there are going to be problems ensuring total OS independence. (2) ideally, the system doesn't require full-time online presence. Should a consultant wind up in a basement office with no internet, he won't be totally lost (again, not perfect). Note: no obligation for Free/Open Source software, although they are preferred. The goal here is an office that communicates and collaborates efficiently.
Ten years ago, you'd be sitting in a cube farm, using Microsoft Office and a shared drive and emailing documents back and forth. Later they'd have added Sharepoint. These days, there's been a ton of innovation in these areas, and there's consensus that collaboration-by-email is not fun. And there are lots of new approaches to these age-old problems.
So, how would you do it?
(Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Tuesday November 18 2014, @08:07PM
Believe me, I'm in the same situation as you are, which is what prompted me to start thinking this out, and to ask the question. It's 2014, and I'm still getting documents that look like what you just described, and I still work with people who treat email like their file system since they don't know how to use a document repository and my office's current systems don't encourage it.
One thing I was thinking about was configuring the mail server to be finicky. Examples:
1. email size limit 10kb for any email sent to an internal address
2. email to internal employees rejected. Use the collaboration system, please.
3. email goes in batches, at 9AM, 12PM, 3PM, 6PM, midnight. That changes the workflow of people who are always, relentlessly catching up on emails, and reduces the value for people using it for real-time collaboration. Now you're forced to use other systems (slack, NNTP, jabber, something) to chat with colleagues.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 1) by iamjacksusername on Tuesday November 18 2014, @09:14PM
You sound like an office that could pretty much dump most of their internal infrastructure. I would not recommend doing any of the things you said above... people have workflows and intentionally breaking them will not help. You need to present them a better workflow and things will get better.
This is what I do professionally so let me know if you want to talk further.
(Score: 2) by WillR on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:13PM