I've worked on enterprise collaboration software before, and came to the conclusions that the users will favour using the simplest thing for the task in hand (email or excel) no matter what SAAS products they have.
The trick then becomes
1. sell to management and get them to gamble on enforcing it's usage, (maybe by taking away the other tools, extensive training),
or 2. have something that works at a grass roots level (e.g. dropbox being used to work around IT constraints) .
I think I may have just restated your post, oops!
I keep wondering if the future for workflow tools might be to unobtrusively monitor user interactions by hooking into the email client, and have an intelligent Clippy-like service which prompts and decorates their tools i.e. prompting to use ContractBeast if a contract is attached to an email (or in fact just doing so), and to display relevant information as and when needed. There was some CRM system extension for gmail years ago which I remember being radically successful.
Could something like that have worked out for you?
*and server in order to provide analysis, archiving etc.
I've worked on enterprise collaboration software before, and came to the conclusions that the users will favour using the simplest thing for the task in hand (email or excel) no matter what SAAS products they have.
The trick then becomes 1. sell to management and get them to gamble on enforcing it's usage, (maybe by taking away the other tools, extensive training), or 2. have something that works at a grass roots level (e.g. dropbox being used to work around IT constraints) .
I think I may have just restated your post, oops!
I keep wondering if the future for workflow tools might be to unobtrusively monitor user interactions by hooking into the email client, and have an intelligent Clippy-like service which prompts and decorates their tools i.e. prompting to use ContractBeast if a contract is attached to an email (or in fact just doing so), and to display relevant information as and when needed. There was some CRM system extension for gmail years ago which I remember being radically successful.
Could something like that have worked out for you?
*and server in order to provide analysis, archiving etc.