It may not be walking 5 miles to school in the snow up hill (both ways!), but there was a time when businesses had to operate with no e-mail. Seems unimaginable now, but people had to rely on phones, face-to-face conversation, and the “e”-less type of mail. E-mail revolutionized the way most offices did business, quickly becoming the main way most of us correspond. 

But has the benefit of e-mail’s convenience become overshadowed by its ability to suck time — big chunks of it — out of our workdays? In an earlier post, tech expert David Kaufman described the stress and time involved when employees get stuck in an  ”e-mail loop,” the phenomenon of spending the entire day only responding to e-mail.  As a solution, Kaufman pointed to the practice of deconstructing the e-mail process as described by David Allen in his book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

Citing the fact that “only 10 percent of the 200 messages employees receive per day are useful,” French tech company Atos is taking a radical approach — a complete ban on internal company e-mails. Employees won’t be expected to go cold turkey. They will have 18 months to wean themselves off of inter-office e-mails, and they get to keep hitting the send button when it comes to external communications with clients and providers. And they aren’t going back to the dark ages, having to pick up a phone or (gasp) walk down the hall when they want to have a conversation with coworkers.

Atos is considering several types of internal communications, including a company-specific social media site (I’m guessing somewhere on the company’s intranet) the Atos Wiki, which can make for a great project collaboration tool, and Office Communicator, the company’s online chat system where employees can video conference as well as share files and applications.

Do you think your company could survive without internal e-mail? 

– Celeste Blackburn

When I first started reading Wired.com’s wiki article on how to conduct a remote meeting, I chuckled a little. Step 1 is “Set a time” — isn’t that a little elementary? As I read on, though, I was reminded that sometimes it’s those simple “no duh” points that we can forget to pay attention to but can mean a big difference when it comes to how smoothly a meeting will run.

Here is a quick look at Wired.com’s 6 steps for running a remote meeting: read more…

As Wikipedia’s 10^th birthday party kicks into the high gear, newly released stats show that 53 percent of Americans visited the user-generated encyclopedia Web site in 2010, which is up from 37 percent last year. I’d rather have folks on this site, instead of “tweeting” about what they had for lunch.

More reasons to worry about a computer takeover of civilization: IBM”s supercomputer just beat two human contestants on “Jeopardy.” The answer is: This is the year when human beings realized that the “Matrix” movies were no longer a fantasy.

Oh, this is convenient. Twitter says that e-mail is on its last leg and will be replaced by “tweets.” Again, how convenient.

In light of this week’s big announcement that Verizon has broken AT&T’s death grip of the iPhone, we wonder: Will it change the course of human history?

Finally, happy anniversary to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who’s been at the top spot there for 11 years.  As a result, bloggers throughout Seattle and techno-blogosphere are asking whether it’s time for Steve to retire.

What else is happening?

-Ralph Gaillard

In our two-part series on hosting a blog on your company’s intranet, I mentioned that one way to use such a blog is as a project journal. Doing so offers many benefits:

• No matter what happens to the employee, the information stays with the blog. If an employee leaves in the middle of the project, you don’t have to worry about making sure he maps out his work before saying goodbye because it already lives on the blog. read more…

You’ve decided you want to make the most of a blog (or blogs) on your intranet. While there are some things you want everyone to be able to see (posts that praise employees for a job well done), there may be times when you only want specific users to see certain posts (when a blog is being used as a place to brainstorm a top-secret project). One way to do that is to have different blogs for different groups, but you can also have one large company blog with several categories with visibility determined by user permissions.

Here are some categories to consider:

read more…

You were so inspired by our first intranet post that you now have a nice, new (or newly remodeled) intranet, and you want to know what you should put on it. Or maybe your company has had an intranet for a long time and you’re looking for new ways to use the resource. A blog can be an invaluable asset to your company and a central focus of a thriving intranet.

You can use an intranet blog purely as (1) a social connector and culture builder, (2) a way to communicate with employees, (3) a project management tool, (4) a source for new ideas, or (5) all of the above. The blog can be open to everyone in the company or only for certain employees, teams, or projects.

Advantages to having an internal blog on your intranet include: read more…

Finally, Facebook has come up with a useful feature that could help the flow of workplace knowledge and improve project collaboration. What do you think? Am I off the mark here?

For those of you seeking new gift ideas to jazz up a lackluster employee reward & recognition program, check out this interesting piece, which dissects the pros and cons of buying an Apple TV vs. a Netflix Roku box. If you haven’t heard of these amazing devices, the boxes, which can be connected to your TV, stream an endless catalogue of movies, TV shows, music, real-time baseball games, and more.

More evidence that Twitter has plans for total and complete world domination.

In light of this week’s secret high-level pow-wow between the CEOs of Abode and Microsoft, one has to wonder if the meeting materials were delivered via PowerPoint or PDF?

And, my favorite tech headline-ever: “7 Percent of Newborns Have E-Mail Addresses.” I can’t add anything else here; the headline speaks for itself.

Although the articles sub-head raises a host of disturbing questions: “By the time they are two, 81 percent of kids have a digital footprint.” Gotta run; need to bump my kids off the computer–and re-acquaint them with “old school” media known as the book.

What else is happening?

-Ralph Gaillard