Path: utzoo!mnetor!tmsoft!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!olivea!oliveb!amdahl!key!wombat
From: wombat@key.COM (Joan Eslinger)
Newsgroups: comp.groupware
Subject: Re: Using news for internal communications
Keywords: news; notes; organizational structures
Message-ID: <2355@key.COM>
Date: 29 Dec 90 14:30:29 GMT
References: <3602@jaytee.East.Sun.COM> <113@intrbas.UUCP> <20813@crg5.UUCP> <1080@zinn.MV.COM>
Organization: Key Computer Labs, Fremont, CA
Lines: 62

I used to work in a place that used news (actually notes) for internal
communication, and it worked quite well within our site, less well
between our site and a few others. I think this is because a
notesfile-using culture developed while the company was still very
small, and it was possible to indoctrinate each new employee as they
came in (some of whom had already seen/used notes before, this being in
Champaign-Urbana, IL). You tell the new person that all announcements
are made via notes and not via mail, or when they ask how to do X say
"look in the notesfile," and they learn to read notes right quick.

Once the place was acquired, we had to start communicating with people
established in Florida, and doing so via notes didn't catch on - they
already had their communication paths set, there was a lot of distrust
on both sides, not everyone there had terminals on their desks, it was a
long time before our computers talked to one another reliably, etc. Then
a new site sprung up in California, populated with a lot of people
straight out of school as well as experienced people, and they used
notes fairly successfully within their site; but there still wasn't much
cross-comm (we were software, they were hardware, and most people on
both sides didn't need to know much about the other side).

When I moved up here to Key, it had a start-up flavor and people were
communicating, but they had all gotten into the habit of using e-mail,
broadcast to all the engineers (and there's an awful lot of hardware-
and machine-tech-related mail that we software types aren't terribly
interested in). On several different occasions I and others have tried
to convert the engineers to notesfiles with no luck; there was no
management support and we were too small a group to work as a critical
mass. I think if management had supported it, or e-mail had ceased to
work, we could have pulled it off but as it is people don't have enough
incentive to change.

Now we are working with a large group of software people within Amdahl,
trying to use news for some discussion, but it's gone in fits and
starts, bumping into some political problems along the way, and never
really being successful (except for some automated-posting groups, which
are essentially logfiles). It's too soon to call this one a failure - it
could very well work out if a couple problems got resolved.

Raw news doesn't present the best interface for some of what you want to
use e-news for. Because each article is a separate file disk space/inode
pressures cause folks to expire everything, but once you have such a
system in place with people contributing useful information you'd really
like to keep some of it around for the life of a project/till next
quarterly update/whatever.

It's really a shame that except for a few pockets like H-P notesfile
development ended - from the start it supported anonymous notes, very
flexible access lists (you could specify read and/or write and/or modify
and/or director privs on per-user, per-group (as in /etc/group),
per-system, per-notesfile bases), grouped all responses together with
the original note and made it really easy to see the original note &
older responses, and used Unix disk space and inodes more efficiently
than news so you weren't tempted to expire all the good info. But there
is nothing that "forces" people to subscribe, so you must still rely on
other means to bootstrap your e-news.

What's the point here? I guess, that in a workplace that has integrated
"e-news" into its way of doing business, it's wonderful.

Wombat
wombat@key.amdahl.com