I can't stress enough the persistent part of the "persistent mailing list."
I worked as a remote employee in a group where we had half the team (couple dozen folks) in an office in Toronto, and the remainder of us scattered about in remote sites across the US.
We had a mailing list for questions along the line of "Hey, this question is important but not enough so to bug anyone in chat." It wasn't persistent in any usable manner; it archived to an Exchange shared folder hosted in the main office, and I learned that searching these folders over VPN was an exercise in futility.
Basically then you'd have new people hiring on and not having the organizational knowledge pent up from all the decisions made in the past. They'd make bad decisions in their work because either
a) they couldn't search the list for help and just decided to cowboy it, or
b) they mailed the list, got blown off for asking a question that has been asked dozens of times before they showed up, and will just cowboy it the next time.
The best enterprise collaboration tools merge read-/post-by-email features with a rich web application. This gives everyone a chance to stay in touch whether they're on a laptop or a blackberry.
Edit: Forgot to add my agreement that Google Groups-style search and archiving is key as the parent poster asserted.
I worked as a remote employee in a group where we had half the team (couple dozen folks) in an office in Toronto, and the remainder of us scattered about in remote sites across the US.
We had a mailing list for questions along the line of "Hey, this question is important but not enough so to bug anyone in chat." It wasn't persistent in any usable manner; it archived to an Exchange shared folder hosted in the main office, and I learned that searching these folders over VPN was an exercise in futility.
Basically then you'd have new people hiring on and not having the organizational knowledge pent up from all the decisions made in the past. They'd make bad decisions in their work because either a) they couldn't search the list for help and just decided to cowboy it, or b) they mailed the list, got blown off for asking a question that has been asked dozens of times before they showed up, and will just cowboy it the next time.