Ubuntu for Small Business

[Stephan Hermann]

On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 07:30 +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 11, 2005 at 07:38:31PM +0200, Stephan Hermann wrote:
> > On Sun, 2005-09-11 at 10:25 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
> > > Stephan Hermann wrote:
> > > >> No, I'm arguing that an IM tool has no place in business, except for the
> > > >> odd help-desk situation - and there are better ways to do that too.
> > > > 
> > > > It depends on your working behaviour. Working with Exchange and emailing
> > > > other people cost me more time, then to phone or write an instant
> > > > message.
> > > 
> > > You're missing the point, I'm afraid.  I haven't the slightest doubt that
> > > email is slower than phoning or sending an IM - for the initiator. 
> > > However, every time you do that somebody else has to give up their time to
> > > deal with you.  There are very, _very_, few businesses where I would
> > > concede that's an appropriate use of time.  Email takes a little longer,
> > > but it uses time more appropriately. 
> > > 
> > 
> > As I said, it depends on the position. If you're working in operations
> > you have to react fast and for this, email is sometimes to slow. Phone,
> > cell or IM is much faster, and gives you the possibility to rais the
> > attention from the engineers towards you.
> 
> You're contradicting yourself here.  You say here that the advantage of
> phone/cell/IM is that you can interrupt someone else, but you said earlier
> that you can mitigate the interruption downside of IM by ignoring it.

Yes and No, it's a bit of a paradoxon. You or your receiver of the
message (doesn't depend now on email or IM) is deciding when you/he is
responding. So in the end it doesn't matter which media you are using to
contact someone.
 

> 
> > > >> Emails are asynchronous.  Business or personal, they still eat time, but
> > > >> they eat it when it's appropriate _for me_.
> > > > 
> > > > Same applies to IM..you decide when to answer and when you have time to
> > > > answer.
> > > 
> > > It can, but imo there's an expectation among users that you'll respond.
> > 
> > So, personally I don't expect, that someone will answer me in time. Why?
> > Because I think, when I'm busy, the other person can be busy too.
> 
> And at this point e-mail is going to be a far better option, because as I
> understand it (from my quite limited experience with IM systems, mind) if
> you shutdown your machine before you read and respond to the IM, it is lost. 
> An e-mail lives in your inbox, getting in your way until you deal with it
> (admittedly, the misspelt 'Deal' button on your keyboard doesn't seem to
> solve the problem most of the time, but I'm sure that's a kernel bug).

For propietary IM protocols this can happen, with jabber not. The
message is saved in the offline message queue and you receive the
message as well when you are back online. Normally I don't close my IM
or eMail until I reboot or shutdown the laptop or workstation.
So nothing is lost.

> 
> And e-mail can be similarly interrupting to IM if you want it to be -- your
> e-mail client can pop up an annoying dialog box telling you have new a new
> message, in an astoundingly similar way to your IM client.

Yes, thats why i'm configuring my email clients to not popup with
anything, the same for my IM client...it reminds me through taskbar
blinking...that's not annoying and not making any sounds at all.

> 
> > So, during meetings, cell is off and IM stands on away, so everybody
> > should know, that I can't respond.
> 
> So the problem with e-mail isn't that it is slow (which it sure as heck
> ain't), but that it lacks a reliable method of presence notification?  That
> explanation I can live with.

Email is slow, because when u get many mails and you don't priorize
them, you won't get importance of the mail. And priorizing mails is not
in the standards (the last time I read the RFC 822 and the enhancements
it wasn't in there ,-)). And yes, presence notification is one of the
advantages of IM and this is why I want to have a good integration of
mail and IM (IM here doesn't mean only sending messages between 1:n
people, IM stands for jabber/xmpp which is more) on my desktop.

Regards,

\sh