The news about Atos’ ‘zero email’ policy a while back had us thinking seriously about the implications. Now firstly, to be clear, the Atos ‘zero email’ is ONLY to do with internal email. In other words only internal communication between Atos employees will have to be done using other forms of communications and not email. The press, when this was reported, did not really make this clear, and I think a lot of people (including us) thought it a rather crazy thing to do. In the BBC’s story HERE word’s like ‘stupid’ were apparently used. Atos boss Thierry Breton would like this to happen by 2014. They will obviously be hoping to achieve this using new collaboration and social media tools.
Well what we had been thinking as I’m sure you are dying to hear is that using Salesforce in your organization could actually make this same ‘zero email’ policy a reality, by using the hugely successful and popular Chatter which is Salesorce’s take on internal organizations social media.
If you have salesforce in your company then to give Chatter to your users is FREE and they don’t need full salesforce user accounts. You could encourage users to login to Chatter at the beginning of the work day, then they would be able to collaborate quickly and easily, including the ability to share files and use the Chatter mobile apps. There is even a Chatter desktop app which would enable users to auto-login once their PC boots up. For companies without salesforce you can get Chatter for FREE by signing up at chatter.com. To use salesforce’s own phrase, it will be ‘Facebook for the enterprise’. If you think this would be useful to your company to increase employee’s productivity and reduce internal email then contact us for help and advice. This could make Atos’ dream become a reality for much smaller businesses and organizations.