Real-Time Team Collaboration from Gmail

Imagine you’re running an agency with 5 employees, 10 remote workers, 30 clients, and 20 active projects. Real-time collaboration is paramount to the success of your team, your projects, and, ultimately, your business. 

But with clients preferring to use email and a team located around the world, how do you keep on top of your projects and communication without letting things slip through the gaps? 

You’ve probably tried Slack, Asana, Trello, and Hubspot, built zaps to connect the tools and designed complex workflows to trigger actions, but it all feels fragmented and time-consuming. 

We’ve been there!

At Gmelius, we’ve transformed Gmail into your company’s workspace. Instead of switching between a web of connected apps, you can easily collaborate in real time with your team on external emails, tasks, internal chats, and more – right from inside your Gmail account. 

5 Reasons Why Teams Love Gmelius for Real-Time Collaboration

#1 Shared Inboxes

Gmelius’ shared inboxes are used for teams to collaborate on emails that come into your business or a specific department. This eliminates the need to bcc, cc, or forward lengthy email chains to your co-workers. 

Instead, you can create a shared inbox for the sales department, for example, and invite all the relevant people to it. Anyone on the sales team will be able to receive, read, and respond to emails sent to the shared inbox. 

By keeping all the communication, quite literally, on the same page, there’s a transparent and linear record of all prior communication. You don’t need to worry about sending duplicate emails or incorrect information. 

Plus, it’s highly transparent, meaning no team members are left out of the loop or have to go searching for the information they need. Not only does this improve internal communication and collaboration, but it also saves time. 

Once a shared inbox is set up, it blends seamlessly into your existing Gmail interface, like everything else in Gmelius. You can quickly and easily access the shared inbox in the same way you’d access any other of your email folders, via Gmail’s left-hand navigation. 

#2 Shared Labels

Sharing your whole inbox with your team clearly isn’t an option for everyone. It may feel daunting or it might not be appropriate for your business. Whatever the reason, if you’re not quite ready to share your whole inbox with your team, use shared labels instead. 

Like shared inbox, shared labels are folders located on your left-hand Gmail navigation. The main difference is that instead of sharing your whole inbox, you share specific Gmail labels. 

The whole process is simple and based on the existing Gmail interface. You can either drag relevant conversations into the shared folder or use Gmail’s existing “Move To” feature. 

All of the team members included in the email conversation can add notes, assign team members, view past correspondence, and reply to emails. The only difference is the fact that you’re restricting the folder to specific conversations and not the whole email account. 

#3 Internal Email Notes

As well as being a pretty awesome way to stay on top of client communication, Gmelius’ chat-style email notes and @mentions allow you to have private, real-time conversations with your team before replying to external messages. 

When you @mention a co-worker, the other person will be sent a push and email notification, so you don’t need to worry that it will go unnoticed. And, importantly, it’s completely private, so there’s never the risk of copying in a client by accident. 

The internal email notes allow team members to collaborate behind the scenes and quickly get up to speed with a client's situation, review historical activity, and eliminate the wasted time spent trying to track down the relevant information from a co-worker or boss.

#4 Kanban Boards

Most emails require some form of action, and most businesses use some form of external project or task management tool, like Trello, to continue with the task. With Gmelius, instead of clicking between the email and project management tool, you can turn your inbox into an inbox-based Kanban board. 

Boards are accessed inside your Gmail account from the left-hand menu, just in the same way you’d access a shared inbox or a regular email folder. In fact, Gmelius fits so neatly into your existing Gmail workflow that you could be forgiven for not being able to find the feature at first.

You can create unlimited kanban boards (choose from one of the pre-made templates or customize your own) and share each one individually with the relevant members of your team. Create a sales pipeline, a weekly sprint, or even a customer support board, by customizing it to your team’s workflow.  

#5 Create Tasks from Emails

Any email can be turned into a task on your Kanban board with just three clicks. From the top of the email (where you usually see the buttons ‘send,’ ‘forward’ etc.), select ‘Add to Board.’ You can choose which board to apply it to and even set a deadline (which, of course, syncs with your regular Gmail calendar), all while staying in your inbox.  

If you need to rearrange your tasks for any reason, from inside your ‘Board’ you can drag and drop cards to reorder them. You can even add a priority rating to the task or assign it to another member of your team. 

So now you know all the shiny real-time collaboration features you’ll get when you install Gmelius. But how do they benefit you in practice?

Much More Than Collaboration

When your team works collaboratively, you foster a culture of accountability and transparency. Everyone on the team has clear visibility and knows what’s expected of them and what the rest of the team is working on. 

You eliminate errors like colliding emails, embarrassing mistakes, emails getting ignored, missed opportunities, and time-wasting jumping back and forth to different platforms like Slack and Trello. 

With Gmelius as your team’s workspace, you can do all this without leaving your inbox.