Why Email is not Enough: Combining Communication and Shared Representation to Support Activity Management

Modern work is highly communication-centric. Research shows the critical role that communication applications - in particular email - play in everyday work. Email is used to organize and delegate tasks, to manage communications, as an archival repository for work documents and as a contact manager (Bellotti et al., 2005, Duchenaut and Bellotti, 2001, Whittaker, 2005, Whittaker and Sidner, 1996). However, there are numerous problems using email for task management (Bellotti et al., 2005, Whittaker et al., 2002, Whittaker, 2005). Users relying on email complain about: • forgetting commitments from self and others (tasks that they ‘owe’ or are ‘owed’) • tracking global task status (it’s hard to abstract from multiple messages to determine where a project currently stands) • determining who’s involved in a complex task • integrating information across different technologies (people may communication about a task in email, voicemail or using IM – and it’s often hard to combine information) • managing attachments. Partly because of these problems, there have been various attempts made to develop alternative models and technologies for collaboration. The most significant of these are shared workspaces such as TeamRooms and more recently Wikis. The defining feature of these technologies is that they support collaboration using a