Email is still one of the most monetizable category in Enterprise space and Google Apps provides an apt platform for startups to build interesting services around the same. Grexit, Delhi based startup lets you do a very simple thing with your Google apps account – share email with colleagues.
The pain point that Grexit is solving is the amount of information (knowledge) that is stored in discussion threads and practically no way to share the same within an organizational context.
Couple of use cases (from Grexit’ blog) that clearly demonstrates the need
- You posted a question to a few of your colleagues. You got some responses, and after a few emails on the thread, you got your answer. This answer might be of relevance to many other people at your workplace who might have the same question that you had.
- You are working on a project and using email heavily to discuss key matters on the project. A new member joins the team, and needs to have access to all these email threads.
- You found a link on the internet that you think your colleagues can use. You forward this to your immediate peers over email, but do not want to send it to everyone as they might not need it immediately, and might consider the email to be spam.
GrexIt solves this problem by letting you add content from your inbox to an online repository, which anyone from your workplace in need of information can access (search). Effectively, GrexIt is a very simple tool to let out knowledge that might be trapped inside your email inbox, and open it up to a wider audience which might need it.
A very useful idea, though the biggest challenge in adoption would be privacy of the emails. Not just ACL (i.e. Access Control List) ensuring some emails are read only by ‘Project Managers of X Group Only’, but these emails are stored in Grexit servers (can only be accessed by your Google Apps ids), which many of us wouldn’t be so comfortable with.
Do give Grexit a spin – it surely is an interesting product and I’d expect the team to launch something similar for Zoho apps as well. Grexit has recently added IMAP support, and plans to expand to other services like Outlook, Thunderbird and any desktop client that supports extension.
Update: Here is a feature suggestion to the team. None of what Grexit does in its current form has actionable component. Why not create a ToDO list of emails that users share, in short make it more useful for a normal email user?
Watch this demo video
Recommended Read: How to Handle Email Overload? | 5 Basic Email Etiquettes for Entrepreneurs
Why not just use SocialWok with Google Apps?
Hi Amit,
Tools like SocialWok help you create a feed of information. The problem with feeds is that there is a lot of clutter (think Twitter), and while it is good for immediately consuming information and moving on to the next piece, it is not good for important, archive-able information that might be needed later.
Another problem with tools like SocialWok – they require a fundamental shift in the way you are used to working.
GrexIt does not ask you to move your communication out of email. You can keep communicating on email, and add important pieces of information from your email to GrexIt so that others can have access. Then, you can use labels inside GrexIt to organize that information. Soon, we’ll have access controls too.
Hope that helped
Thanks,
-Niraj
Co-Founder, GrexIt
I think it should add features buddies@workplace and manager and colleagues. This differentiation will help them increase the utility and also help in controlling privacy issues.
Hi Ankit,
Thanks for your feedback. We’re working on group-wise privileges and access controls, and would be releasing that within a month.
Thanks,
-Niraj
Co-Founder, GrexIt (www.grexit.com)
Seems similar to threadbox.com. Will try and see how it is.
Yes Shashi, there are some similarities with cc:betty, but we have a plugin that makes your job way easier, we replicate threads into GrexIt way after the discussion started, we have good organization in the repository, and we’d very soon have access controls.
Hey Niraj,
This is a useful tool. I’ve already moved on from FF to
Chrome almost a year back. Very hard to shift back to
FF – just for one plugin.
How hard is it to make a Chrome Plugin?
When is it planned for?
Sourabh, Its there for Chrome as well. Just did an install and worked seamlessly.
deeps
Hey Sourabh, as Deeps above just said, we support Chrome. Just download the plugin and give it a try.
Useful tool – but there’s a MAJOR gotcha that I ran into because of which I had to apologize to customers – just not on!
If you add a note to a shared thread – you’d assume (also from the quick/nicely done tutorial) that its shared within the domain. What happens is that it sends out an email to ALL on the thread, in my case, including my customers
Not that I had anything in the note that was offensive, but it was something that I’d rather they not have seen, and had some explaining and apologizing to do for no fault of mine.
Have filed a bug report and hope to see this fixed asap. But thought all trying this out would benefit from knowing this.
Rgds,
Sameer
Hi Sameer,
Sorry for the problem you faced. We’re fixing it now, and the fix would be live in a couple of hours. After the fix is live, GrexIt will by default inform only the people in your domain about the thread that has been shared. You’ll have an option to send it also to the people outside the domain, and it will be UNCHECKED by default.
Hope you’ll continue using GrexIt. Please let us know if you have any further feedback.
Thanks,
-Niraj
Hi Sameer,
We just fixed the issue.
Thanks,
-Niraj
Niraj.
Thanks for the response, and the quick follow-up. Its definitely a useful tool, and shall continue to use it and provide feedback!
Rgds,
Sameer
Ashish, you suggested this: Here is a feature suggestion to the team. None of what Grexit does in its current form has actionable component. Why not create a ToDO list of emails that users share, in short make it more useful for a normal email user?
GrexIt’s response: Coming soon
We’d look to launch it in the pluggd.in event.