Too Many Emails!

I hear it quite often: "I get hundreds of emails every day! I can't keep up." Can you relate? Here are some ways to reduce the clutter.

Step 1 - Your Chatter Emails
I've been heartened to see that more and more people are posting things to Chatter rather than sending an email to the Everyone or Sales or Design group. This is one way to lessen emails. Do you get too many emails from Chatter? Here's what to do (below). Set all your Chatter notices in one place - right now - once!

• In Salesforce, click on your name near the top right, then Setup
• Go to My Chatter Settings > Chatter Email Settings

By default you get one daily digest email listing everything related to you in Chatter -- whatever group you're in, whoever you're following, and so on. So theoretically you don't need any more than that one. It has everything. Now, there may be exceptions to that. Maybe, for example, you'd like to get notified immediately if someone posts an update to something important to you. You decide. AND you set the default for all future groups you're in.

• Scroll down to the Groups section.
• In Set default frequency for groups I join: you can set the frequency of emails for any future groups you're added to. Remember: You'll get one a day that includes all Chatter related to you, so you would be safe to set this default to "Never."
• In the table below, indicate the frequency by group. Again, you could theoretically set them all to "Never" because you'll get everything in the personal daily digest.
• Save!

And there you go! One fell swoop and you've reduced your emails significantly. Now the only other thing is to be sure to post things in Chatter groups rather than send group emails!

Step 2 - Stop & Ask Yourself: Who Needs to Read This Right Now?

Often, the majority of our emails are messages we're being included on, as an fyi. Do your co-workers a favor, and hopefully they'll do the same: Really think before you include names on the cc or bcc line, even the to line. Who needs to see this message right away? Could you make one fyi message that reports a bunch of things to your manager or team member at the end of the day instead of copying them multiple times throughout the day? Or start a list to cover with them at your next meeting?

Step 3 - Rules

You can create mail rules to move messages directly to folders, or even delete immediately. Right click on a message you'd like to make a rule for and scroll down to "Rules." If you need detailed instructions, do a search for "mail rules" in Outlook help (click on the little blue question mark in the top right to get to Help). If you receive newsletters or regular, repeated emails that you'd just as soon have in a folder you check periodically, mail rules can be a great way to reduce what hits your Inbox.

Step 4 - The Future - Project Cloud

There will be new ways to work when we start using Project Cloud ("Dexter in the Cloud" -- Salesforce). We'll have lists of things that are pending -- such as "my pending requests for Khameleon Quotes" or "my pending requests for labor quotes" or "my forms waiting for approval" and so on. I think we'll find we don't need the email requests every time -- we'll just get in the habit of living in those lists.

We may also use Chatter in a new way in Project Cloud. You know in ServiceNet how you have a tab for discussions? Well, in Salesforce you can use Chatter on any object and have "discussions" there.

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Hope these ideas make sense and help. What about your ideas? How do you handle the email blizzard??

Proof That Murphy's Law is Just Plain Evil

1. Weeks ago I turned off the automatic agent to send out birthday notices because we had a new shared company calendar in Outlook.
2. Therefore I took out the task in my termination checklist to un-check "send birthday notice" on employees' Lotus Notes person documents. (We have to keep them in the system to make sure we don't miss any mail, but by un-checking this field, the agent would skip them.) No need - right? - since I had turned off the agent anyway.
3. This morning the birthday notice went out. (Why?? The agent was turned off! Maybe something changed when our server died this weekend??)
4. And - here's the part that's just plain evil - the one notice that mistakenly was sent was for an employee who's no longer working here. (What's up with that? If it had to mistakenly fire, why not send one for an employee who's still employed?) Really?!

Look, it's MacGyver! No, wait, it's Paul!

"Braver Than Most...Smarter Than the Rest"  

If you are of a certain age, you've heard of the t.v. show MacGyver, and perhaps even used the term "MacGyvered." I thought of that show yesterday when Paul told me how he'd made a literal band-aid repair to a laptop.

Wikipedia describes MacGyver as "a resourceful agent...able to solve complex problems with everyday materials he finds at hand, along with his ever-present duct tape and Swiss Army knife." Paul's been known to use duct tape as well, but in this particular case he used a band-aid. We sometimes talk of fixes being "just a band aid," but in this case, that was a good thing!

Monique's laptop keyboard, and also Jesse's, were acting very strangely. Here's Jesse's description: "About 50% of the time I press "e" on the keyboard I get "poiurewq". I also get "\;lkjfdsa" when I press on other letters I get "\; lkjfdsa". When I press "c" it activates the microphone and takes me to the previous browser page." How weird is that? Jesse, displaying some detective finesse of his own, sent us a link to a tech forum where others wrote about a "tape kit" you could order from Lenovo (the maker of our laptops).

The issue was this: The ribbon connecting the laptop keyboard to the laptop itself had a hole worn into it from rubbing against a sharp piece of metal protruding from the laptop frame, causing the keys to short out. The "tape kit" fix was a piece of adhesive material with some padding which you place over the sharp metal, preventing it from creating the hole.

Paul ordered the tape kit, but that would take 2-3 days to get here, so on Friday he went up to San Francisco, opened up Monique's laptop, and put a band-aid over the sharp metal. Who needs an official tape kit when you're MacGyver? Paul just snipped a band aid to size and -- voila! -- problem solved. He "MacGyvered" that thing!

There you go, "smarter than the rest," indeed

What's Going on With "Dexter in the Cloud"?

First, I need a better name. It's not going to be called "Dexter in the cloud." But for now that name makes the idea fairly easy to understand.

There may be a few of you who don't know about Dexter in the cloud so I'll quickly explain. Basically, I'll be moving the functionality of Dexter -- the processes we perform there -- out of Lotus Notes into the "cloud" -- the internet, specifically into Salesforce.com.

Most of you know that my effort in this direction has been going on a long time. If you look back in this blog you'll see where I wrote about working with ServiceMax, an app inside of Salesforce.com, to bring Dexter to the cloud. Well, after getting us to the point where we were pretty much ready to start beta testing, I took a step back and decided that using ServiceMax was not the right way to go. I had thought that it was about 80% of what we needed out of the box, but it actually turned out to be more like maybe 20%. Just not a good fit, nor a good way for us to spend our resources.

So, it was back to the drawing board. I didn't lose all the work I'd done last year, but a significant amount for sure. I hate that it's caused this long delay but I really feel like this was the right decision. Better to get it right at the beginning.

I've been working with a consultant to recreate Dexter in the cloud. By the end of next week I believe I'll be ready to show some key users a demo of Phase 1 -- creating a project through to requesting work from a sub-contractor labor company. Phase 1 will not include scheduling and dispatch from Tech Services. While I'm working on designing that Tech Services piece, we can test the initial processes.

Watch for more details as time goes on. This is a huge project and a big change for us, but it brings with it all kinds of potential.