Considering the variety of products that exist on the collaboration marketplace nowadays, somebody looking for a knowledge sharing solution may feel overwhelmed. Or have a hard time distinguishing between the various types of products.

To make it easier for people to understand what Quandora, our Question & Answer product, brings to knowledge sharing compared to other tools, we decided to start a new blog post series: How is Quandora different from… 

Episode 1: Mailing lists

Mailing lists are email discussion lists, meant to help you find out what is going on in your organization and more specifically to collaborate with your co-workers or other communities using email. That’s why they’re very popular among open source projects, for instance. It’s a way to distribute information to the whole organizations or partners, using a resource at hand: email.

Mailing Lists Limitations

Unfortunately, there are significant shortcomings in using email lists, that get indivisibly reflected on the potential of this internal knowledge sharing option:

• No or rudimentary archiving at best. After you join a mailing list you don’t have access to what’s been discussed before. Some mailing lists may offer access to archives, but they only offer poor user experience and limited search capabilities.

• Limited search and discovery options. Except for the general email one. Labels or folders don’t assist in search the way tags do, so searching can be a chore.

• Primitive user experience. A mailing list is, well, email. Meaning that you’re limited to the email experience. As convenient and enduring as the email may be, there’s no doubt that it doesn’t meet the modern expectations in terms of UX: smart, dynamic, fun, social. This is probably contributing to the trend among companies of getting rid of emails as much as possible, often in favor of ESNs.

• Easier to neglect. People use mail filters so that emails do not overload their inbox and impede their everyday work, so they forget to monitor it.

• Impossible to choose what you want to receive. With mailing lists, it’s all or nothing: either you receive every email, or your receive none. You cannot specify topics, keywords, or authors and get rid of the noise.

Comparison with Quandora

Now, all of the above as opposed to Quandora:

• Permanent access to past discussions. Once you give access to a new person to your domain, according to its role, they can browse all content that’s been captured already.

• Dynamic search and discovery. Questions can be browsed and filtered by date, author and tags. It is quick, easy to use and intuitive as a result of its auto completion option and advanced tagging system.

• Rich User Experience. Quandora provides a clean, simple and fun user interface. It’s social, allowing users to follow each other and to vote for their favorite posts. It’s playful thanks to game dynamics, badges, leader boards and reputation points.

• Rich notifications system. You can use other communication channels than email. Quandora provides a series of social integrations like Yammer, Zendesk, HipChat and many others.

• Non-intrusive approach.  You can subscribe to what’s interesting to you – tags, knowledge bases, people, or just opt for a weekly digest. Or neither and access all content from integrated social tools newsfeed.

Bottom line is: stop wasting time trying to solve problems that have already been solved. There is valuable content in mailing lists, but a dedicated knowledge sharing tool helps with getting faster to the expertise in your organization and capture, centralize and communicate knowledge across different locations and time zones.

P.S.: If email is the most familiar workflow in your company and people just won’t let go, we also support pushing content (asking questions and answering) via email 🙂 Just sign up for our 30 days free trial and judge for yourself!

Happy Knowledge Sharing!