- Probably the most ubiquitous methods
of collaboration center around basic communication.
Take texting or instant messaging,
chats and email, for instance.
All integral parts of the modern workplace.
What are the differences between them, though?
That's partially defined by function
and partially by technology.
The highest level of complexity,
and the most flexible, is email.
Email messages can be thought of as distinct documents.
When you hit the send button on your message,
it goes through your email system server,
then gets delivered to the servers of any recipients.
It sits there until they open the message,
at which point it downloads from the server to their screen.
Email can be one-to-one or one-to-many communication.
You can send your message to a single person
or a large group.
Email messages can be stored and organized for reference,
which makes them great for sending announcements,
newsletters, reports, updates, and so on.
They're not quite as useful for ongoing conversations,
especially with more than one person,
since it can get complicated
following a long chain of messages.
We'll talk more about that in a later video.
Instant messaging, or texting, and chat,
tend to get combined in people's minds,
but I think we can make a distinction between them.
I'm going to say that the defining factor of instant messaging
is that it's a contained conversation
that happens in its own place,
whether texting back and forth with someone on a phone,
or using a message-heavy app like Cisco Jabber
or Facebook Messenger.
You can do other things with them, attach files and images,
even go direct to video conversation,
but their primary purpose is quick conversation.
Another big difference with texts and IMs,
is that they're generally a one-to-one conversation.
Although it's possible
to add in additional people or groups,
usually they're just two people talking to each other.
I'm going to define chat as the conversation
that happens within a conversational thread area,
inside a larger team area.
Think Slack or Yammer.
Or Cisco Spark.
There are multiple groups set up that people belong to
because of interest or organizational reason.
Inside each of these groups are ongoing conversations
that members can read and participate in.
This is another thing that distinguishes chat
from text, too.
Chat tends to be persistent.
That is, it remains visible as a historical record
so that people can refer back to it,
and so that conversations can continue as needed.
Text messages are usually much more ephemeral.
One more distinction we can make about our three modes,
synchronous verses asynchronous.
Okay, fancy terms.
What I mean is that with texting,
we're typically looking at a conversation
that's happening right then.
That's a synchronous conversation.
Most of the time, email is going to be read later.
Unless it's that important message
you've been checking for every 30 seconds.
But chat falls somewhere in between.
Maybe some of the people in the conversation
will be actively participating
in the back-and-forth exchange,
but other members might just check it later
when they have the time and interest.
I'll freely admit that none of these definitions
cover 100% of the permutations.
But I think that this will give us common ground
during the rest of this course.