Project Communication
What I mean by silo’ed is that email traps information into personalized, unsharable, unsearchable vacuums where no one else can access it – the Email Inbox. Think of your Email Inbox as a heavily fortified walled garden. Not mentioning the difficulties many have accessing their Email Inbox outside the corporate firewall, the Email Inbox contains a hodgepodge of business, personal and private information that most people do not want to share with others.
Precisely why I favor the use of a tool like BaseCamp or PHPCollab. Both are simple tools to track the communication, collaboration and basic tasks and documents of a project. They are not full blown MSFT Project web applications, but are best viewed as Project Communication Managers.
If you need a better way to track and communicate around projects stop emailing each other and let one of these tools provide email to people as needed, or better yet, an RSS feed of the projects they choose. At Bowdoin we’ve started using BaseCamp and it is a nice replacement for emails with attached Word memos (well, I still get those unfortunately), and provides an easy way to track and see what others are thinking and working on.