Forwards and CCs are the mechanisms that make email suitable for many-party conversations. They are also very inefficient, which is why services such as Yammer do so well, but email’s extreme standardization makes it ubiquitous, so those are the tools we use.

Enter Squadmail, which has one of those ideas that seems quite obvious in retrospect: shared, cross-client email folders for collaboration. Or, as the company is fond of putting it, Dropbox for email.

The Berlin startup is bringing the service into public beta on Tuesday, following a successful private testing period. This is a service that can prove useful in both personal and business contexts, and the company says it’s been surprised at the level of early corporate takeup.

Just two months after sending out the first invite to a corporate user and with $0 marketing spending, we recently acquired the 500th company (with many more on the beta wait list right now),” Squadmail co-founder Philipp Mayer told me.

The idea is simple: Squadmail creates and syncs folders that are shared between IMAP mail servers, making the choice of client irrelevant. Each folder gets its own email address, and users can also drag emails from their personal folders into the shared folder, removing the need for CCs and forwards.

And the uses are also easily apparent. Businesses with heterogeneously-equipped staff? Friends trying to organise a shared flat rental? People who want easily-dumpable pseudo-accounts for newsletter signups? Check, check and check.

Readily international

According to Mayer, the private testing period has already drawn in active users in more than 70 countries. Squadmail is obviously a readily international service, but the bulk of the takeup has come from the U.S., and that’s already the core market for the small German firm.

“Right now, Germans make up less than 10 percent of our user base with a steadily declining share and U.S. users are rapidly approaching 50 percent,” he said. “When we first launched an early alpha in January we focused almost all our marketing efforts on Germans, thinking our chances were better with local users. But it turned out to be incredibly hard to gain momentum in Germany with beta conversion rates 50 percent below average and low activity rates for German users.”

As you can tell, Mayer is unusually confident about sharing stats on his product’s usage. Fair enough: there’s a lot to chew on there, particularly when it comes to that keen corporate takeup (half of which comprises small IT companies, with the remainder a mix of Fortune 500s, universities and NGOs).

Corporate users, who are not charged yet but will soon be targeted with additional paid-for features, are around 50 percent more active than users with private accounts, he says. It also seems that two-thirds of business users’ folders are shared with email contacts, with on average three people sharing each folder.

And the remaining third? Just one user — there, it appears the customers are using the folders for ‘Bacn’ mail.

There are a couple of downsides, such as the fact that the folder’s email address must currently end in ‘@box.squadmail.com’ (although the team says it will allow customers to use their own domains soon). The biggest limitation that immediately strikes me is that you can’t send emails from that shared folder/email address to someone outside the sharing group, but that will only be a barrier for some.

For the rest of us, Squadmail may be pushing it with its “Enjoy email again” tagline, but it’s certainly a tool that makes email that bit more relevant in this collaborative age.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• Social Media in the Enterprise
• Personal tools lead to practical business

With the collaboration market already crowded with everything from task-focused tools like Asana to social products such as Yammer, plus offerings pitched to specific groups (Atlassian for software teams, Wiggio for college students), it’s hard to imagine an unoccupied niche for yet another tool, but Santa Monica, CA based startup Sparqlight thinks they’ve found one — scaling down business process management to provide a flexible, cloud-based option for the average knowledge worker.

“There’s people at the bottom of the market that have products like Do.com, online to-do lists, and they’re useful but they don’t have automation. They don’t have analytics. At the other end of the spectrum, you have huge BPM tools that can do workflow with automations, but it’s like trying to use a sledge hammer to drive in a tack,” explains Michael Weir, Sparqlight’s CMO. “Those [tools] are for companies with rigid industrial processes and everything that could possibly happen is built into the system. Our product is for what I call the big fat middle — people who need workflow, transparency, templates but who also live in the modern world where they collaborate with anyone, anytime, anywhere. They need it to be improvisational.”

Sparqlight was founded in 2010 to address this market segment and has thus far been entirely bootstrapped. It launched its public beta at SXSW this year, attracting more than 1,000 companies so far, from HR departments to engineering firms. Now they’re announcing the public launch of their enterprise solution. Like many of its competitors, Sparqlight has opted for a freemium model, offering a free, stripped-down version for individuals and small teams and from today a beefed up product for paying enterprise customers priced at $20 per user per month.

So what sets this product apart from other collaboration tools and allows it to target the “big fat middle”? In short, easy automation through templates. The base of the product is a to-do list and task tracking system that lets you assign work to yourself or others — either internal Sparqlight users or external non-users via email — setting due dates and reminders, commenting on tasks, and allowing you to track what’s outstanding and which steps have been completed. The result is an activity stream that can be filtered by project, importance, person or due date. So far, pretty similar to, say, Asana in its focus on following tasks rather than people and building a product that’s more about getting stuff done that breaking down barriers to information sharing.

The difference is a slightly more complicated set of enterprise-friendly additions like templates and analytics. Say you’re an HR person who routinely has to go through a checklist of activities for each new hire, from contacting IT to set up a new workstation, to putting together a benefits package. Sparqlight allows you to set up a template for that routine which, each time you use it, automatically inserts the relevant to-do items in your stream as well as the streams of collaborators—so in our hypothetical HR case, IT (either the group or a specific individual) would automatically receive a to-do item telling them to sort out the new hire’s tech tools. It’s also possible to automate workflow steps with Sparqlight. So after IT marks their task as completed, you can specify that a request be sent automatically to facilities to wheel over a comfy new chair, for example. Sparqlight also offers simple analytics that track how well users are doing at getting their tasks done in the free version and a heftier set of analytics tools, including key performance indicators for management, in the enterprise version.

Though Weir says individuals “see a lot of value just in creating to-dos and goals with associated to-dos and using templated workflow,” he concedes that the product “does start to add a lot of exponential value if you have other people on the system.” The product, in other words, is very much an enterprise tool that seems most useful when broadly deployed within a company. Sparqlight is planning on reaching out in the future to actively sell it to businesses rather than just rely on viral growth and small team adoption, Weir says.

The central premise behind Sparqlight — that routine work is boring and time consuming and automating these tasks frees up time for actual constructive and creative work  — will be immediately compelling to most knowledge workers. Who likes repetitive donkey work after all? To accomplish this goal, though, Sparqlight needs to be adopted, and whether the product is both powerful enough for enterprise and pleasant enough for individual workers to actually use remains to be seen.

Has anyone out there given Sparqlight a try, or if not, does this sort of automated workflow sound appealing?

Image courtesy of Sparqlight.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• Report: High-Impact Collaboration in the Enterprise

Study after study shows that flexible work arrangements increase productivity and make for happier employees. But at the same time study after study reveals middle managers resist the idea as undermining their control and burdening them with additional responsibilities. While your initial impulse to this reality may be to throw up your hands in frustration and declare them dinosaurs, a recent forum on paid family leave at the Ford Foundation took a more constructive approach.

Cali Williams Yost, CEO of the Flex+Strategy Group / Work+Life Fit, attended the event and wrote up an incredibly useful post on the conclusions reached for Fast Company. In her experience, she writes, simple top-down strong arming of middle managers doesn’t get results. Instead, she suggests simple but effective techniques to help them work through their objections to flexible work and win their wholehearted buy-in:

Ask middle managers to help articulate the “why” or business case for work flexibility in your organization, and then let them participate in determining what that flexibility will look like. Interview middle managers–the supporters of flexibility as well as the naysayers. Ask them why they think it is or is not important to be more flexible in the way work is done. Encourage them to tell you how it will solve their business challenges. Gather groups of managers and employees together to expand this shared vision they’ve created. At the end of the process, people feel invested in this approach to flexible work that they developed themselves.

Allow middle managers to freely express the “prices” they fear they will pay, while also helping them to focus on the payoffs of work flexibility. I love naysayers. When I am consulting to a group of managers about work flexibility and one of them has the courage to say, “Yeah, but I’m going to be left doing more work,” I want to hug them. They are articulating one of the very real fears many of the middle managers have about changing the way work is done. When you give middle managers a chance to share those concerns freely, they are able to move beyond them. They start to see the long list of benefits from having a more flexible approach to work. But if they can’t, they get stuck behind the fears.

Establish the expectation, at the beginning, that any issues related to work flexibility that cause the group not to meet its goals will be resolved by everyone, not just the manager. For example, a manager finds that having two people in the group teleworking from home on the same day causes difficulty with customer coverage. That manager would call the group together and ask them to help her come up with a way to solve the problem. She wouldn’t be expected to take it upon herself to make it work.

Rather than suggest that middle managers need “bootcamp” and to be browbeaten into accepting that the future of work at their firms is more flexible, Williams Yost takes a more respectful route that treats managers like concerned and frightened humans not thick-headed impediments. And who isn’t more persuaded by respectful dialogue than insulting hectoring? William Yost’s approach seems not only more humane but also more likely to be effective. Want more details? Her post is interesting throughout and well worth a read in full.

What’s your approach to winning over remote work skeptics?  

Image courtesy Flickr user familymwr

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Personal tools lead to practical business

Software, Marc Andreessen declared last summer, is eating the world. In the pages of the WSJ, the Netscape co-founder reeled off a list of industries that were once about something else and are now are dominated by software, from Amazon in the bookselling space to Skype in telecoms and Netflix in video. That’s good news for the American economy, he argued, but it also seems to be really good news for Atlassian.

The Australian software company offers tools to help teams build software and it’s had a phenomenal run of 40 straight quarters of profitability, pulling in more than $100 million in revenue last year (with exactly zero salespeople). Entirely bootstrapped for the first six years of its existence, the company is now rumored to be pondering an IPO. And president Jay Simons feels they’re just getting started. Why? Well, because software is eating the world.

“We chose early on to really focus on what we think is a strategic problem for all companies, which is how do you build software better?” Simons explained to GigaOM in an interview, “and one of the reasons that we’ve exploded is that we’re at the beginning of this digital revolution. Entire industries are being upended by software companies.”

Like Andreessen, Simons cites the usual suspects of Netflix, Amazon and Skype, but he feels that these well chronicled cases are only the tip of the iceberg, and that’s only good news for his company. “Brick and mortar companies in almost every industry are now having to differentiate their own products through software,” he says, offering the automobile industry as an example.

“If you watched the Super Bowl, it was oversubscribed with automotive commercials and each of those automotive commercials was actually advertising software. The car itself isn’t going to evolve much mechanically. What has totally changed is that software is now driving fuel-efficiency systems, safety systems, on-board entertainment and navigation systems. Google famously, and I’m sure the auto industry itself, is trying to figure out how the car is going to drive itself,” he says. “Your television set, your alarm clock, your garage door opener, your thermostat, you don’t think about those things as software products but they are or they soon will be,” Simons concludes.

This change, he argues, is literally and figuratively bringing software development out of the basement of companies and making it central to what they do, reconfiguring the workflow of everyone from customer service folks to marketing pros in the process, as they too find themselves involved in producing software. “Some of the creativity, business requirements and customer requirements are all going to come from non-engineers. They need to be communicated and shared and iterated with the engineers that are going to transform those into code. That’s a big difference today than it was five years ago,” Simons says.

Despite these promising trends, the growth of the company may not be without friction, as PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy points out. “Right now there’s a feel-good API stew of these up-and-coming social enterprise players all wanting to support one another, ” she recently wrote. “That’s in keeping with the consumer Internet world, where people generally believe it’s not a zero-sum game and there is room for multiple players. But in the enterprise world, where people pay for software, a land-war might develop between who wants to be the knowledge worker portal and who wants to be a mere API partner integrating into it.”

These lurking potential problems aside, Atlassian’s ten-year-old bet on helping engineers and non-techies build software together seems to be paying off for the time being. “What developers and what people create with code is in some ways limitless,” Simons says before mentioning the speculation about an impending IPO. “I’m personally excited about it,” he says. No wonder lots of other people are chattering about this potential IPO in the usually less than sexy world of development tools too.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ianmyles.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• Report: High-Impact Collaboration in the Enterprise

Traditional business culture, with its emphasis on networking, meetings and pitching, doesn’t generally favor introverts. And as Susan Cain argued fairly recently in The New York Times, the current management mania for collaboration, is making matters worse for the quiet ruminators among us. Is remote working the solution to the problem?

We tackled this question in relation to the coworking movement previously, soliciting opinions from space owners and users. Many of them argued that, though coworking spaces have a social element and stress togetherness and connection, the fact that the user sets their own level of contact, as opposed to having interactions dictated by a boss, means coworking provides a good balance of interaction and alone time for introverts.

But how about remote work itself, without considering coworking as a mediating factor – does work location independence further isolate the already socially distant or help them better modulate their level of connection? That’s the question an interesting post on Workshifting by Natalya Sabga tackled recently. In it Sagba focuses on her personal experience as an introverted “workshifter,” relating her ups and downs as she’s attempted to strike the right the balance between solitary work and social interaction:

I’ve been dipping my toes into the workshifting pool since 2009. It’s been an ideal set of circumstances for an introvert like me, as I work in a quiet space where I can control my daily dosage of interruption and interaction. Ideal, that is, until too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing.

Introverts need interaction, too. That is just human nature 101… Introverts who work in a standard office setting get their daily dosage of interaction by default. Introverts who workshift have it harder – it’s too easy to focus on a project or assignment and forget that there is an external world that we need to be part of, too!

So, after basking in every introvert’s dream for the past three years, I realized that I needed some balance. Sometimes, my workdays are intense, and I really can only focus on work. I don’t fight my introverted habits on those days as that would adversely affect my productivity. Other days, when my schedule is lighter, I remind myself to explore new spaces to workshift from, make time to see friends or volunteer.

A couple of points are worth noting here. One is the danger that the ability to work from anywhere might enable more withdrawal than is healthy among introverts. While loneliness is an often-cited drawback of working from home, the idea that someone could like the alone time but suffer for it professionally and psychically in the longer-term is a subtly different point that’s worth bearing in mind.

The second aspect of Sabga’s post worth pondering is the fact that she has both the awareness to notice her own excess of solitude and the freedom, due to technological empowerment, to correct it. Too often, many have argued, we choose our work environment on autopilot and fail to both recognize the degree to which the location of our work affects us and manipulate how we work by manipulating where we work.

Do you think remote work presents special challenges for introverts?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Pascal Maramis.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Putting Big Data to Work: Opportunities for Enterprises
• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Today’s businesses require highly virtualized and services-on-demand environments. And that’s causing the network as we have known it to undergo a dramatic change. Brocade is leading this transformation with cloud-optimized networks that simplify infrastructure, increase efficiency and provide scalability so you can deliver applications, services and virtualized desktops anywhere on the network, securely and without interruption. Soon we’ll even be able to do the same with your entire data center. The future is built in. Brocade has over 25 combined years in building data center networking and Ethernet fabric technology. Learn why 90 percent of the Global 1000 and two-thirds of the world’s Internet exchanges rely on Brocade at brocade.com/everywhere

Women make up the majority of online freelancers, consultancy Zinnov recently revealed when it surveyed 30 of the top online hiring platforms. But how about the world of offline independent work –do women dominate there as well? Independent work consultancy MBO Partners released its own findings today (complete with the requisite infographic) indicating they do.

Zinnov reported that 55 percent of online freelancers are women. MBO Partners says a similar percentage (53 percent) of all American independent workers are also women, which amounts to 8.5 million women across the country working on their own. Compare that to women’s 47.6 percent participation rate in the traditional workforce and you may start to wonder if the gig-focused future of work isn’t a better match for the needs of women.

Several experts and female independent work veterans have speculated that the greater flexibility of independent work might be more suited to the desires of women and take advantage of their ability to weave together communities of collaborators and their generally lower attraction to high-status, long-hours,  battle-up-the-ladder-type career paths.

Drawing on their Independence Workforce Index, MBO Partners’ numbers supports this idea that independent work tends to suit women and that flexibility plays a central role in this. 77 percent of women independents are satisfied or highly satisfied with their mode of working, according to the consultancy, and 74 percent plan to remain independent. When asked why they plan to remain independent, 65 percent cited flexibility, 64 percent said control over their own schedule and 59 percent noted the enjoyment they get from being their own boss.

Not every woman is independent by choice, however. And MBO admits that the recent recession and spotty recovery are forcing some women to get creative about their career trajectories. “As the country continues to struggle with economic recovery, women have forged a viable third path that empowers them with even greater control and freedom over their lives and careers. It also gives them a new definition of work-life success,” Gene Zaino, CEO of MBO Partners, said, putting a positive spin on the less happy face of women forced into independent work for a statement accompanying the data.

The relative gains of women over men in the workplace have been much discussed in the last few years (exhibit A: the term “mancession”) – is the rise of independent work one more factor making work more female friendly?

Image courtesy of Flickr user tibchris.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• The rise of tablets in the enterprise

I have often wondered why we have not seen a newer, more mobile and more touch-centric descendant of Adobe’s portable document format, popularly known by its acronym – PDF. And while we wait,  four guys from MIT have come up with a super easy way to see PDF (and Microsoft Office) files on the mobile browsers without needing any kind of plugins and special add-ons.

Crocodoc, a San Francisco-based startup that has been in business for nearly five years and has gone through some pivots, is today launching a new HTML5-based enterprise service that essentially takes a PDF, strips out the text, photos and all the formatting from it and renders it on your mobile browser within three seconds. (Of course, it doesn’t work with password protected PDFs.) The best way to experience this technology is to click here and see this PDF document.

Crocodoc is going to offer this technology as a service, mostly for large companies. It already has signed up the likes of SAP, Dropbox and LinkedIn. While Crocodoc will handle processing for smaller companies, it allows large customers such as Dropbox to run the service off their services. Dropbox has been testing the technology for a while and is using it for its recently launched web viewer and easy link-sharing service.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Connected Consumer Market Overview, Q2 2010
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

Today’s businesses require highly virtualized and services-on-demand environments. And that’s causing the network as we have known it to undergo a dramatic change. Brocade is leading this transformation with cloud-optimized networks that simplify infrastructure, increase efficiency and provide scalability so you can deliver applications, services and virtualized desktops anywhere on the network, securely and without interruption. Soon we’ll even be able to do the same with your entire data center. The future is built in. Brocade has over 25 combined years in building data center networking and Ethernet fabric technology. Learn why 90 percent of the Global 1000 and two-thirds of the world’s Internet exchanges rely on Brocade at brocade.com/everywhere

Remote working is often about practicing what you preach. Sell an online meeting product? Of course your workers should put it to the test by working while traveling. Have a brand that’s all about breaking the mold and getting outdoors? Then you can’t expect your employees to be chained to a desk. Built your company during 3am coding binges? It’s hard to tie your tech team to a nine to five schedule. But what if you’re company is all about tracking time? What sort of effect does that have on how you run your distributed team?

For the answer, just ask Harvest. A New York-based company founded by a couple of designers fed up with the tools available to track time and bill clients, six-year old Harvest now has 22 employees, a third of whom are spread around the country – and a unique approach to management and communicating without being co-located, as co-founder Danny Wen explained in an interview.

Tools

The heart of Harvest’s method is a pair of tools. First, the one they sell – a product to help professionals easily log where all their minutes go. But they also built a second sister product dubbed Co-op which is available free online (though presumably will be of more limited use without it’s paid-for sibling). Together they function as Harvest’s virtual office. “Co-op is essentially a private Twitter for business. In this case, the product in integrated with Harvest, so throughout the day when somebody’s updating a status about what they’re working on, they’re actually starting a Harvest timer as well,” explains Wen.

But before you think of this set-up as just a way to monitor that no moment is wasted, Wen explains that everything, even the most frivolous of office activities, gets logged. “Co-op provides the informal channel for sharing things that are interesting around the web — articles or lately it’s been a lot of animated gifs just to help people kind of kick back. You have the work updates but there’s also this layer of general cultural sharing,” and that, he argues, has been key to gluing distant members of the team together.

“We realized a lot of stuff that may happen in the office — for example it’s somebody’s birthday and we do some sort of celebration — we think is all fun and games because we’re caught up in the moment. We’re here in person, but what we don’t realize is our remote team are wondering what happened to everyone on Co-op. And it’s our job to bring that mix back into Co-op,” Wen says, disagreeing with others who have argued for keeping different streams of work-related and off-topic chat segregated.

Co-op is a virtual space for team bonding, but it’s tracking function is also a valuable way to help management allocate tasks. “One of the guys on the team recently started to train two of our younger developers,” Wen offers as an example. “Through Co-op and Harvest and having the knowledge of where the time is going. We’re started to assess just how much time it takes to train a new person. Having the knowledge of how much time is being used for something you might have initially thought is no big deal, has really helped us to have more realistic expectations.”

Talent

The Co-op-centric work style at Harvest means a facility with communicating at a distance is key to getting hired. So if you’re looking for a gig there, put a little effort in to demonstrating you can express yourself across tech channels. “When we start the process of interviewing for somebody remote, in the extreme cases where they’re building a web page just to sell themselves, to say here’s my story and here’s why I think Harvest is a great fit for me, it’s great. I think that automatically put them in a certain funnel,” says Wen.

So worry about how you present yourself, but not your location. “We just search for the people who are the best at their craft wherever they are,” Wen says. And if you do manage to get hired, don’t expect to be handed a ream of rules and regulations. “We have this really lightweight employee handbook. It states people should work the hours where they find themselves to be the most productive,” explains Wen.

Tips

Besides Harvest’s data-driven remote management style and integration of team building and time tracking, the company also relies on modern updates of old-fashioned institutions to tie distant employees together. Take the ‘Harvest Reading Club,’ for example. “We use Instapaper, where when we find interesting articles and we star them. It gets aggregated into a daily email and distributed to the team. So somebody is in New York commuting in on the subway reading an article that somebody in Montana might have found interesting the night before,” says Wen.

They’ve also adapted old-fashioned training for their spread-out team. “We’ve set up what we call the Harvest Academy. It’s basically a resource for anybody within the team to write something internally about something that they’ve learned or if they attended a conference they can share some thoughts,” Wen explains. “It is just an internal WordPress blog, but it really helps people to feel like they’re part of the team.”

All tech toys aside, Wen still feels, like many of those we’ve spoken to for Tales from the Trenches, that occasional face-to-face gatherings are invaluable. Harvest brings everyone together for twice yearly summits in New York. “We think it’s hugely important to take people offline because after those few days of getting an understanding for each other face to face, people really have a different way of bonding and therefore a different way of working with each other when everybody goes back to their remote posts,” he says.

That being said, Wen doesn’t agree with Zaarly exec Shane Mac, who recently came out against the idea of remote teams for early stage startups, saying distance is a break on serendipity and creativity. Harvest has been remote right from the start, and Wen believes the structure never stunted idea generation. “Yesterday we were working on a design for one of our Harvest branded screen wipes and I happened to be working from home but I was working with a designer that’s here in the office,” he offers as an example. “We could sketch ideas back and forth very easily using sketching applications like Paper for iPad and just using HipChat we could iterate quickly back and forth, using Skitch to show ideas to each other. For us collaborating remotely is using these tools in the right way. It’s not about the remote situation but the tools and the people that can make that process work.”

Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview