Email: Make it structured, social and actionable in Podio

29.08.12 Posted in Product News by

Let’s face it, email isn’t going away anytime soon. It’s still the easiest way to make that initial contact in almost any business relationship and to have short, less structured conversations with people you don’t regularly talk to. However, it’s pretty clear that email sucks for collaboration. Group conversations are a mess, workflows are impossible, as is getting a clear overview of what actually needs to be done, and by whom.

That’s okay. Email wasn’t built to be a collaboration tool. That’s Podio, and that’s why today sees the introduction of a new and improved way of bringing emails into your workflows on Podio –  adding structure and making emails social and actionable. Here’s how it will work for you:

Email to Status Message

Say you get an email from a customer, an agency, or a vendor that you’d like to discuss with your team. You can now forward the email to the relevant Podio Workspace. This will create a status message with the subject, body and any attachments from the email. Your team can then discuss the status with comments, without a cc-email in sight.

At the bottom of each workspace activity stream you’ll now see a ‘Create status via email’ icon. Click it and you’ll get your personal email address for the stream; you can either add it to your Gmail, Hotmail or Microsoft Exchange address book, or copy and paste the address from there. Forward the email to that address and it will become a status from you in the workspace. After the first time you do this the address will be saved in your email contacts so it’ll be even faster next time.

Email to App

Creating app items from emails is a great way to add structure and start workflows from messages that can easily get lost in your inbox. If you’re recruiting and a job candidate sends you their application via email, you can forward it to your Candidates App. A new item in the app will be created using the subject line, body and attachements from the email, for example their CV or portfolio. Your team will then be able to review the candidate and indicate if they should be be considered for the position, along with discussing the candidate with comments. You’ll find your email address for each app by clicking the wrench icon in the top right corner of the app, followed by ‘Email to app’.

Email to Task

When you receive an email that you need to take action on – for example, review a report or send a quote to a customer – you can now forward it to your personal task list in Podio. Keeping all your tasks in one place, with all the rest of your work. When you’re looking at your personal task list, you’ll find the email address to forward the emails to on the right hand side.

For Google Apps users you can take this a step further with the Podio email gadget. This enables you to assign tasks to specific co-workers and workspace, as well as attach them to specific app items to add real business context to each task. You can find out more about that here.

Your Workspaces, Apps and Tasks as contacts in Gmail, Hotmail and Microsoft Exchange

When you create a status message, app item or task from an email, the addresses you forward the emails to will be saved in your contacts list. Then next time, you’ll only need to type the name of the workspace in the forward box of your email to create the status. Here’s how it looks in Google:

We’re hoping with today’s additions to Podio, you’ll be able to tame your inbox and make it a more useful starting place for your workflows and conversations in Podio. As always, we’re really looking forward to hearing what you think.

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About the author

I believe Podio is at the center of the biggest shift in how we work since the industrial revolution. I carry this message to media and to anyone else who'll listen. Boom.

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  • http://www.churchbuzz.org Patrick Steil

    Thanks Podio for more enhancements to a phenomenal product!

    This won’t allow us to REPLY back to the original sender from the email, correct?

    Email to App has been there for a long time, correct? Is there anything new about that part? I understand Email to the Activity feed and Email to Task are new which is great…

    Thanks!
    Patrick Steil
    http://www.churchbuzz.org

  • http://podio.com Michael Dean

    Hi Patrick,

    Email to App has been improved so you can easily save the addresses for your apps in your email contacts. Plus, there’s the option of a non-personal email address that you could give out to clients for example – they can then email the app and the items they will create will appear in a similar way to how items appear when created by a webform.

    You’re right though, it’s not possible to reply to emails from Podio.

    Cheers for the kind words!

  • Guest

    Is there a way to set the due date when using Email to Task?

  • Anonymous

    It’s super annoying that all formatting is lost in the email to task feature via Google Apps. If there’s more than one paragraph of text, it becomes impossible to read. I spend more time cleaning it up than it would have taken to copy & paste it directly into Podio, which either way, is a huge waste of time. Any plans to fix that?

  • Tom Hopkins

    hi all. So email to app is same as before – as in you can only create a new app item? You can’t add or append your email and attachment to an app item? Are there ANY plans in the works to implement something like this? I love podio, but I have to keep our company with Basecamp, simply because I cannot see any way to forward a mail, containing info and attachments to do with a certain project – to the app item that is that project. Most info from the outside world re: projects comes in email. That email needs to be filed by project. Creating a workspace for every project is unwieldy (unworkable basically) with 35+ projects in progress at any time. Copy paste and re-upload is not a system that will be adhered to. The simple ability to email to an app item would allow us to use Podio for projects and not just an intranet. Am I missing a smart way to work around this…?

  • http://www.cazoomi.com/ Clint Wilson

    Tom,

    Our team uses Streak in Google Apps for some of the tasks you are doing above then with SyncApps marries them to our Podio spaces.

    This might be an option for your team too.

    ~Clint
    @cazoomi

  • http://www.facebook.com/dave.berndt1 Dave Berndt

    I haven’t been able to get Podio to interact with our Microsoft Exchange Account through Godaddy. I keep getting errors. Podio says it is Godaddy’s issue and Godaddy says it’s Podio’s issue. I am at a loss.

  • Sarah Rollins

    How about forwarding status to a project, instead of a workspace? Workspaces are so big – I spend the most time monitoring individual projects.

  • http://www.churchbuzz.org Patrick Steil

    You can do that! Just look at the bottom of your Activity feed for a link that says: Create a status via email … :)

  • http://www.facebook.com/filchambers Phil Chambers

    Hi Dave,

    Can you forward the thread from GoDaddy to phil@podio.com so we can see what their Exchange config should be?

    Cheers.

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  • globiweb

    Podio is an amazing platform. It’s so good that I actually purchased stock in Citrix when they acquired Podio.

    I understand Podio’s philosophy on getting away from email, but in my experience, this is never going to happen when dealing with external customers.

    For this reason we created http://www.podiomail.com and it allows you to keep your conversations going through email only, while Podio keeps a record of all conversations. It also allows you to email directly to an app item.