The Electronic communication tool to facilitate more groupware is

This idea of a poll is very good, but I think that the tool is dependant of what kind of groupware you mean.
I´ve personally voted the second option: Email, because there´s a lack of email built in capabilities in every opensource groupware/CRM that´s I´ve ever seen. I´ve not tried all of them, of course, but I´ve checked out the most active projects on Sourceforge, and besides that Sugar, ACT (wich is not open source), Tiger (wich is really a sugar´s fork), all of the several groupwares that are included in fantastico and the demos in opensourcecms.com.
Some have ticket capabilities, but it´s not the same, because in general those tickets have to come to a special form inside your site, and not always includes emails sended directely by users from their email accounts.


I´ve found that none of them has a way to easily handle incoming email, from teamworkers and outsiders aswell.
If -let´s say- a prospect customer emails your company asking for some service, and one of the teamworkers opens it, he may want to:
- Directely reply to that person, archiving the email but letting other members of the team being able to read about it
- Contact his superior / team member before answering the email about a special aspect of it, and then, when he receives an ok, send the answer.
- Redirect the email to another team member for him/her to respod because the email was meant for another area of the company.
...


I haven´t found yet a CRM/Groupware that can handle that.
The one that lets you think that can do it, maybe it´s Sugar, but it does it in a very poorly unsafely manner.
(I´ve asked this at the Open Source Conference "Cafeconf" 2006 recently realised in Buenos Aires, where Sugar partners gave a class about Sugar. They even told me that Sugar can´t handle email in a stable way... they used Outlook Express! :-S


Anyway, the thing is that if you mean by groupware the tool that facilitates the creation of a brochure or paper by a team, maybe a wiki or blogging is better than email.
But if you mean a team working as a one single person, trying to answer emails from anonymous users that just send emails to the first @ that they encounter in your webpage... maybe email is the one.
I really don´t know how this tool have been so underrated by Gropuware/CRM softwares.


Anyway, I would like to read your thoughts about this :-)
Regards,


Rosamunda
Buenos Aires
www.ligadelconsorcista.org