Workplace Workarounds For Increased Productivity

It's fascinating to watch how workers adopt to restrictions placed on communications in their workplace. In the example listed below, a couple employees from the St. Paul Pioneer Press have figured out how to achieve mobile access to their work emails by routing all of their work emails into a mobile accessible Gmail account:

Your Tech Weblog: Making a Treo-packin' co-worker productive

"Getting easy access to Pioneer Press e-mail on a wireless handheld is a bit tricky. BlackBerry users have it easy here because we're set up for mobile BlackBerry-based e-mailing, but users of Windows-based devices need to be a bit more creative.

I simply set up my co-worker's Outlook program on her desktop PC to redirect copies of all her work e-mails to a Gmail account. She can pull that up on her Treo as well as her home PC to keep up with work mail. I've done that (on my home Macintosh, I don't have a mobile Web gizmo) for a long time.

Works great. And this automatically creates a searchable Gmail database of work messages for future reference, which has been a lifesaver for me on more than one occasion."

I doubt this is an endorsed practice internally at the Pioneer Press, but it's clearly being done with good intentions: to improve productivity. So apologizing for creating a workaround that makes them more productive is a good position to be in.

What workarounds have you seen used in your office? Using Meebo and Koolim when IM software can't be installed are two that come to mind. What else?

Comments

1. Posted by: Nick Johannes on October 9, 2006 3:17 PM:

I don't know about any other sysadmins out there, but users forwarding all their corporate e-mail across the public internet anywhere strikes fear into my heart and instantly brings on the cold sweats.

What happens if there's a 0-day gmail exploit, and suddenly all of your corporate discourse is out in the open? seems pretty risky for a little more convienience.

I find it hard to believe that an organization like the pioneer press isn't running a web-based mail service such as the one exchange includes. I'd even say that the one that comes with Exchange 2003 is even... good.

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