CircleUp announced yesterday the availability of a free downloadable toolbar for Microsoft Office Outlook. By integrating the free CircleUp service with Outlook, CircleUp extends its current consumer service to small business, home office and professional users to support email and group communications. I have written about CircleUp before (see CircleUp – Enhancing Group Messaging) and think there is great potentiail for its use as an enterprise 2.0 tool. It is not limited to small business as many of the scenarios they offer apply to large entperpirses as well such as the following.
CircleUp all of the employees in a business to ask "Will you be making a change to your benefits election during open enrollment?" and get back an orderly list of people who need the paperwork, instead of a tonof emails
CircleUp a large number of sales reps in the field to ask for suggestions on how to solve a thorny customer problem. Get back a single, organized result that can now be shared by everyone, and found quickly and easily for future reference.
CircleUp 200 exhibitors participating in a trade show to get last minute information about logistics. Get back a single, organized result that can be output in a variety of different Microsoft Office applications instead of a blast of emails and IMs.
I wish I had this application when I was repsonsible for a large teams. It does some of the things that wikis can do for event planning without requiring users to go to a new site and deal with a new tool.
The annoucement also had some interesting stats. It said that up to 90 percent of collaboration occurs through email and up to 75 percent of an organization's knowledge assets stored in email messages, according to The Messaging Technology Report, The Radicati Group, June 2007.
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