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# re: Using Email as a Knowledge Base 4/25/2005 10:16 PM Darren Neimke

Hi Scott... interesting observation. I imagine that you can get a similar effect with Exchange/Outlook and Msn Desktop.

# re: Using Email as a Knowledge Base 4/26/2005 12:11 AM Wessam Zeidan

Heres another interesting use of gmail accounts

http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm

# re: Using Email as a Knowledge Base 4/26/2005 6:38 AM Petr Felzmann

It's worth make this special GMail account public to search by other developers.

# re: Using Email as a Knowledge Base 4/26/2005 8:02 AM Scott Mitchell

Darren, I'd say the advantage of using GMail over something like Outlook is that the resource is available anywhere. With Outlook, assuming you are downloading mail from a server and storing it on your local computer, what happens if you're at a client's site without your computer, or visiting your grandma in Timbukto and are needing to know the answer to an ASP.NET question?

Petr, I considered making this GMail account public (i.e., giving away the login information), but I don't think the advantages outweight the potential negatives, especially since anyone can do what I did. Here's what I view as the advantages & negatives (feel free to comment on these further):

ADVANTAGES:
-- Shared sources of "conversations." Others might know of on-target listservs or other email-accessible sources of information, thereby adding to the quality of the knowledge base.

-- Saves others of having to do the setup work I did on Sunday.

-- Folks could use the GMail account as a messageboard, in a sense. Got a question? Email it to the GMail account and it will be archived to a particular label. Later, when someone else is checking for an answer, they might answer puruse the "unanswered questions" section and answer your question while they're there.


DISADVANTAGES:
-- People could be mischeivious and delete messages, give out the email address to spammers, sign up for off-topic listservs, etc.



Sure, there are many more advantages than disadvantages, but it wouldn't take much to make the resource essentially useless, at which point those perphiery advantages don't matter one bit.

# re: Using Email as a Knowledge Base 4/26/2005 2:55 PM Bart

I don't think you could make the account public as eventually some loser would change the password and lock everybody out.

# re: Using Email as a Knowledge Base 4/26/2005 3:08 PM Bart

Here's an idea that might work. Bloglines allows a user to create an RSS feed from emails sent to your bloglines email address. Use that email to sign up to all the mailing lists. Then, make that feed part of your public list of feeds.

# re: Using Email as a Knowledge Base 4/26/2005 10:14 PM Rick Strahl

Scott, interesting idea but for me this wouldn't work. There's too much non-critical stuff in email alone to make this really a viable storage mechanism. Any search is bound to come up with too many false positives.

For Knowledgebase stuff I tend to use Help Builder (our documentation tool). My internal knowledge and track base is something like 2000 topics at this point and I basically store info into whenever I find anything interesting. The hierarchical structure makes it easy to organize this stuff and also search it. Along the same lines in the past I've used a Wiki for this sort of thing - it also works well but a Web only environment tends to be too tedious in most cases.

Sorry didn't want to sound like a commercial, but this has worked really well for me internally and I have in the past published the output from the HB as well although not recently.

# re: Using Email as a Knowledge Base 4/27/2005 5:50 AM Mark

Scott was kind enough to hook me up with a Gmail account a few months ago and I've now switched to Gmail full time. BTW, Gmail is now above 2.1 GB of storage and growing daily. It's nice not worrying about backing up my PST file all the time when I used Outlook. It's also nice to have access to all my e-mail no matter where I'm at and the lightning fast Gmail searches. Finally, now that Gmail is offering 50 free invites, why not create one or more accounts for multiple purposes. The knowledge base is an excellent idea. I'd be curious to hear any other innovative ways to use Gmail.

# re: Using Email as a Knowledge Base 4/27/2005 6:44 PM Mike Singer

> DISADVANTAGES:
> -- People could be mischeivious
> and delete messages, give out
> the email address to spammers,
> sign up for off-topic listservs, etc.

You can mirror the main account as many times as you want using mail forwarding to other accounts. One member - one account. Moreover, for each member you can set up personal incoming and outgoing filters. Even more - passing the output through dedicated Google group you can supply a member with the digest version of the ...eh... how is it to be called, - mailing list, group?
The member in his turn can further split, filter and redirect his stream.
And personally I found pretty convinient sometimes to redirect a particular channel to Google's Blogspot, say,
http://piclist-pic.blogspot.com/
(don't take the link too seriously :-)

Regards,
Mike.

# Need a GMail Invite? Drop Me a Line! 4/28/2005 3:07 PM Scott on Writing

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