Author Topic: How do you integrate FO with your existing email clients?  (Read 10171 times)

Snoozer

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How do you integrate FO with your existing email clients?
« on: May 26, 2010, 10:55:00 am »
Hi,

do you have the same situation:

in your organization an email client in combination with email servers (for example exchange server from microsoft) are heavily used for years.

so everybody uses outlook to write emails and the calendar for some kind of collaboration....

and people in your organization love outlook / the email client. because they know how to handle it. because they use it many years. because everything is configured and it works. perhaps even the IT staff is happy, because they don't want new systems. and because an email client of course is great.

so far so good....and now?

the email client in combination doesn't have all the features feng office does have.

the solution: force people not to use outlook any longer and totally use feng offices email module and calendar.

does that make sense? I think it's nearly impossible in an organization to do that, because of the reasons mentioned above.


so what to do now? let's discuss that here....how do you use feng office in combination with your existing email / calender client?

the best thing would be if a user could answer to an email and automatically that integration would be in available in fengoffice. same for calendars...

an approach: http://help.teambox.com/faqs/advanced-features/email


activecollab does have such i feature i guess...

so let's discuss it...i thrilled to hear how you combine these two worlds...

greetings

cabeza

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Re: How do you integrate FO with your existing email clients?
« Reply #1 on: May 26, 2010, 11:06:47 am »
Very interesting thread Snoozer!

Would love to hear how everybody uses it.

pedja

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Re: How do you integrate FO with your existing email clients?
« Reply #2 on: June 15, 2010, 07:21:50 am »
I guess the easiest and probably most functional solution would be to make FengOffice usage independent on email. All communication should be done within FengOffice.

karlstatt

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Re: How do you integrate FO with your existing email clients?
« Reply #3 on: June 16, 2010, 03:46:21 am »
All communication should be done within FengOffice.

Yes. Everything else is a bad solution I think. It is "no fish, no meat". Just the combination of emails with workspaces, contacts and anything else, the relations between every information an the search is one of the most charming function of an groupware / organizing / intranet-software. Feng Office allows this very well. You should not devide it into several applications.

Interesting perhaps would be the ability to import from existing systems mail, tasks, contacts and appointments.

"Wash my pelt, but don't get me wet" is not possible.

Snoozer

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Re: How do you integrate FO with your existing email clients?
« Reply #4 on: June 16, 2010, 05:29:55 am »
in same web based suites you can answer with your email client and the answer will be shown in the web based suite.

example:

www.activecollab.com/tour/

then click on email integration for seeing the video


text:
Always up to Date

Email is one of the best ways to keep up with the projects. That's why activeCollab® will send an email notification to project members when events such as new task creation, new comment or file version occure.

The content of notification emails can be customized by system administrators.

Incoming Mail

Since version 2, activeCollab® allows you to post a comment by replying on email notifications you received. If system receives a message that is not a reply to a notification, it will automatically create a new ticket or discussion based on it.

System that handles incoming messages has full support for reading files attached to them.

Email is Convenient

Everybody knows how to use email. By having ability to send and receive email it's more likely that your clients and employees will adopt the system. Instead of a sudden switch to a new way of working, they can continue to use the tools they are familar with.





damendieta

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Re: How do you integrate FO with your existing email clients?
« Reply #5 on: June 21, 2010, 09:26:14 pm »
I would like live integration between feng and outlook / thunderbird / evolution

Change people habits is one of the most difficult things to do and if feng has a better integration with e-mail clients it will be really easy to start using, and with the time it will be able to replace the e-mail client.

No matter how good is feng, people has it's customs and they are not open to change.

One example is Linux software, linux is grate and better than linux in almost every detail, but people use windows all over the world.

I hope this idea to have acceptation. I think it can be the difference to make FO a greater success.

Daniel.

garrans

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Re: How do you integrate FO with your existing email clients?
« Reply #6 on: August 18, 2010, 11:59:05 am »
I think the teambox approach that Snoozer educated us on is a winner for a few reasons:
a) Does not require massive amounts of training
b) Doesn't require users to change their email approach, its ok if 1 user likes Hotmail, another Gmail etc.
d) keeps it web based. Links inside emails to create emails could be used to drive user behavior.
e) parsing software stays on server, email integration is already there.

Steve Garran

brendonhatcher

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Re: How do you integrate FO with your existing email clients?
« Reply #7 on: August 26, 2010, 06:13:39 am »
The more I integrate Feng Office into my business practice, the more I realise that external email clients are not practical.

The key benefits of FO in terms of emails are:

Controlled shared access to email conversations - I can see what conversations are happening across my team, and with clients

Workspace assignment of emails and attachments - a client sends a doc as an attachment.  This automatically appears in Documents, under the relevant Workspace.

Email to task - instead of manually creating a task, I can just click a button to generate a task from an incoming email

Since these features are not native to email clients, I cannot see how integartion of external email clients will ever be possible.

I just forced all my staff to use FO email by closing down their pop accounts and moving them into FO :-)

Regards
Brendon

Tryll

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Re: How do you integrate FO with your existing email clients?
« Reply #8 on: September 03, 2010, 03:13:12 pm »
In my case I use my local mail application (Postbox) to pre-filter incoming emails, ditch spam, etc. It then moves business related items (via rules) into various IMAP folders, which are reserved for FO. FO that way only has to deal with relevant content. I can also drag emails which are not affected by rules into those folders to have them "sent" to FO.

Once the rules are setup, it's pretty transparent, and I don't even need to look at my local mail application very often.