the Coordinator
Category None
Ed Brill has an entry on his blog (link) that references an article in the Financial Times about email being out of control. In the article there is a passing reference to a program called "The Coordinator". This was one of the first collaboration products that I implemented but I am pretty cloudy about the exact date. It was sometime in the mid 80s and it may even have predated cc:Mail. (interestingly it's one of the few topics in the last year that I have been unable to successfully google) The program had some interesting concepts and I would suspect that some of its features which seemed alien at the time would have more appeal today. As the article points out, there was no provision for sending "how are the kids" type of messages. The program was designed around the principal that the only reason you would send a message to a colleague is because you wanted him/her to perform a task, or because you were responding to a request. Depending on the category of message, you as a recipient would have a certain amount of time to respond and to make a commitment to perform the task. The amusing part was that the program would automatically compose demanding messages for you to send when timely responses were not received. As we have all been frustrated by co-workers that never seem to respond to task requests, it is easy to appreciate this feature, but in 198x email was so new that this seemed just too impolite to utilize.
I don't think we used the program for more than a week or two before shelving it, but I kept the manual for many years. There was some relationship between the company and Warner Enhart's EST movement (perhaps only in my imagination) and the manual had long new age discussions about referring to meetings as "commitment of your bodily space" etc.
Despite the fact that we resoundingly rejected the program at the time, it did incorporate some very forward thinking for the time and I ran into one of the original team members 5 or 6 years ago that was incorporating many of the original concepts into a Notes application.
Ed Brill has an entry on his blog (link) that references an article in the Financial Times about email being out of control. In the article there is a passing reference to a program called "The Coordinator". This was one of the first collaboration products that I implemented but I am pretty cloudy about the exact date. It was sometime in the mid 80s and it may even have predated cc:Mail. (interestingly it's one of the few topics in the last year that I have been unable to successfully google) The program had some interesting concepts and I would suspect that some of its features which seemed alien at the time would have more appeal today. As the article points out, there was no provision for sending "how are the kids" type of messages. The program was designed around the principal that the only reason you would send a message to a colleague is because you wanted him/her to perform a task, or because you were responding to a request. Depending on the category of message, you as a recipient would have a certain amount of time to respond and to make a commitment to perform the task. The amusing part was that the program would automatically compose demanding messages for you to send when timely responses were not received. As we have all been frustrated by co-workers that never seem to respond to task requests, it is easy to appreciate this feature, but in 198x email was so new that this seemed just too impolite to utilize.
I don't think we used the program for more than a week or two before shelving it, but I kept the manual for many years. There was some relationship between the company and Warner Enhart's EST movement (perhaps only in my imagination) and the manual had long new age discussions about referring to meetings as "commitment of your bodily space" etc.
Despite the fact that we resoundingly rejected the program at the time, it did incorporate some very forward thinking for the time and I ran into one of the original team members 5 or 6 years ago that was incorporating many of the original concepts into a Notes application.