Collaborate via e-mail

If your team thinks "collaboration" means hitting the "Reply to All" button, you might want to give them a tool that integrates collaboration via their favorite application - the Outlook or Lotus Notes client. Kubi Software, which launched at this year's DEMO conference, has done this with its Kubi Client.

Kubi Client is a plug-in to Outlook or Notes that lets users "collaborate" right in the application they know best. The idea is that end users will more likely collaborate with team members through their e-mail client rather than through a separate client application or browser (such as those in our main story).

Our team of four testers (all in four different locations) downloaded the Kubi Client and installed it on our systems. Two testers were using Outlook 2000 with their POP3 e-mail accounts, the other two sites were using Outlook in conjunction with an Exchange server.

The Kubi Client creates "Kubi Spaces" that include windows for Discussions, Contacts, Task Lists, document storage and a Project Timeline. Any team member can create a new space (they become the team leader) and invite other team members to participate. Any user who doesn't have the Kubi Client installed gets an e-mail with an invitation to download a trial version.

Content that sits in the Kubi spaces stays on the client (as a personal .PST file), not on the Exchange or Notes server. When new content is added (such as a new document posted or a new discussion "post"), the system sends messages to all the other team members, who then see the content refreshed. When an offline member comes back online, the Kubi Client searches for new content and refreshes the information in their Kubi Space.

Because Kubi is married to the e-mail system, your happiness with Kubi is directly proportional to your happiness with your e-mail system. Our four testers all had different issues with the Kubi Client, such as not receiving invitations from team leaders, to a long "refresh" period while waiting to join a space. One tester's Kubi Client kept "shutting down" periodically, and another one had some issues with the antispam filter connected to the server. Another tester began having other system problems after Kubi installed, only to have those problems vanish after she uninstalled the client.

Collaborating via the Kubi Client never fully took hold, either. Instead of posting questions/comments to the Kubi discussion boards, we all just continued to hit the "Reply to All" button on our e-mails. Even though Kubi was integrated into the Outlook file, it took a conscious effort to constantly check the Kubi Space to see if a new message was there. For the most part, we still lived in our in-box. To be fair, true collaboration never truly caught on with the other workspaces either, but we thought our best chance for collaboration would be in the e-mail system itself.

In the end, we think collaborating via e-mail is valid - once Kubi can get the installation/setup bugs out of the way, and adds features such as chat, whiteboards, and the like to the mix.