TechCrunch: Nielsen Deletes Reply-To-All Button

February 1 2009

Not sure I would have thought this news-worthy....Lotus Notes customers have been making interesting customizations to their e-mail environment for many years.  Culture, as much as technology, plays a role here:

Nielsen management, after years of research, has finally come up with an adequate solution to cluttered e-mail inboxes and inefficiency in office environments: control-deleting the reply-to-all button from the messaging software.

In a move that could have come straight from Mike Judge's Office Space, the company has decided to remove the button from their e-mail program of choice, Microsoft Outlook, affecting all 35,000 employees across the globe. In a memo, republished by Folio, Andrew Cawood, Chief Information Officer for Nielsen Company, writes that the measure will "eliminate bureaucracy and inefficiency".
Link: TechCrunch: Nielsen Deletes Reply-To-All Button >

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Messaging  Add/View Comments [17]

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  1. 1  Charles Robinson http://www.cubert.net | 2/1/2009 1:12:29 PM

    If you notice the screenshot in the TechCrunch article the button isn't actually removed. You can still click it, it just gives you a notice that the action isn't available. If it's not available why is it on the screen? While you can't remove the button from Outlook there is a way to disable it. I'm surprised Nielsen didn't go that route since it's cleaner. In Notes you really could remove the button, which takes this a step further. Seeing a disabled button would give the impression it could somehow be enabled and cause some confusion.

  1. 2  Mike Brown  | 2/1/2009 2:42:34 PM

    Removing Reply To All from the Notes Inbox is something that I've done at every company at which I've worked. That prevents it from being clicked by accident, when the user actually wanted to click the Reply button instead, which is the real problem.

    In Notes, however, you can still click Reply To All when the Reply form itself comes up. That way, you can still do a Reply To All if you want to, but you have to make the conscious choice to do so. It's virtually impossible to do it by mistake. Win-win.

    Cheers,

    - Mike

  1. 3  Ports http://www.mrports.com/ | 2/1/2009 4:28:27 PM

    I'm glad I don't work on their helpdesk for the next couple of weeks :-) Sounds like a bleak Outlook. If only they had considered training their users on how to use communication tools instead.

  1. 4  Scott Skaife  | 2/1/2009 8:16:05 PM

    You laugh, but at my wife's job before last, she was reprimanded for putting events into her Outlook calender and having it auto mail a reminder on the day that she was supposed to manually email everyone a reminder. Apparently using communication tools as they are designed was a big no-no at the company. She was told that it "confused the other employees".

  1. 5  Clayton Price  | 2/1/2009 8:44:15 PM

    Should we close all McDonalds stores because you might get fat ????

    Maybe ;-)

    Please.... invest in training users to better understand the impact of their actions/behaviours. Better still, train people how to make effective use of the tools available. Maybe then when it is said that Notes is "more than an email system", people beyond the techo's actually understand !

    Just my $0.02

  1. 6  Gregg Eldred http://www.ns-tech.com/blog/geldred.nsf | 2/1/2009 10:00:36 PM

    Sorry, @4, I am laughing. "Confused the other employees" how? Because your wife wasn't in office when the reminders went out? Or that the machines knew when to send notifications? That is really funny and I apologize. :-)

  1. 7  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 2/1/2009 10:04:41 PM

    @1 not convinced the screen shot on TechCrunch is from Nielsen versus an "artist's conception". But I'm sure it isn't as clean in Outlook as it can be implemented in Notes.

  1. 8  Andreas Kuhs http://abbers-in-switzerland.blogspot.com/ | 2/2/2009 4:16:56 AM

    I actually would not take it away without giving something instead. If a mail is sent to a group and the group is supposed to respond back to the group, we should move that into a forum where it can be shared instead. And even if it is a sensitive topic you could offer the option to limit the discussion to the list of recipients. But at least get it out of the individual mail boxes into some common space, such as a Connections forum or anything similar.

    And as others have commented I also would say: you need invest a lot more in educating people on how to best use the tools at hand.

  1. 9  Murray  | 2/2/2009 5:57:54 AM

    Well it sounds like a typical knee-jerk reaction, something easy for the IT Director to present at the next meeting. I agree with the idea of educating people better, but the reality is that in any kind of credit crisis education is one of the first casualties. Why spend money training people when you can just fire them instead? Isn't that Microsoft's philosophy?

  1. 10  Flemming Riis  | 2/2/2009 6:22:16 AM

    you can grey out the button with a GPO that would be prettier but not sure if you can remove it completely

  1. 11  Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 2/2/2009 7:54:41 AM

    There is no substitute for training or communication to people about rights and wrongs (or even a bit of awareness of the issues potentially caused). Despite the fact that we have collaborative file sharing easily accessible at work, I found myself deleting several 'quota busting' e-mails last night. Of course not from the Lotus team in the UK - we've done that job of ensuring they use Quickr or Activities where applicable, and on the whole that approach works.

  1. 12  Michael Smith http://magnitudesolutions.com | 2/2/2009 8:23:04 AM

    One of my clients recently removed the Reply To All button from their Outlook clients. I find it interesting in an age of cheap storage and faster networks that companies feel inclined to do this now. I wonder if these suggestions are coming from lawyers more than CIOs?.

  1. 13  Mark  | 2/2/2009 8:31:02 AM

    We simply added an extra alert box for the Reply-To-All button, just to make sure the user REALLY wants to send this to everyone. Seems to work just fine most of the time.

  1. 14  Kevin Mort http://www.theglobalmind.com | 2/2/2009 9:14:18 AM

    @12 I don't think it's really an issue of storage or bandwidth, although those could come into play.

    It is the whole message reply that's sent using reply to all and subsequent "please don't use reply to all" notes sent of course using reply to all...an attempt to eliminate PEBKAC issues by policy.

  1. 15  David Bell  | 2/2/2009 10:16:37 AM

    @12 - storage is cheaper to buy these days, but still costly to manage properly.

  1. 16  Brian Miller  | 2/3/2009 11:29:41 AM

    We do it a bit differently, and a lot smarter. We removed the reply-to-all button from memo and reply forms, and added it back in when you're editing the response email. The effect is that you have to consciously click one more time to include everyone in the reply. This prevents "accidents", and reduces email clutter without making people feel like we're controlling how they send their emails.

    I love how hackable the mail template is. Let's see anyone do *that* with outlook!

  1. 17  Jason Blum http://phenotypical.com | 1/24/2012 6:00:32 AM

    Funny, I've always thought the *reply* button is the problem, not the *reply-to-all*. My argument is that people who abuse email by emailing everyone under the sun and replying-to-all without anything substantive to add are people problems in need of managerial intervention, not technical problems needing technical solutions.

    On the contrary, there's something a little sneaky about hitting *reply* on an email on which others were copied. If it's really warranted, you can always forward a discussion on to an individual. But if you're having to do that so often, that's a sign of, again, broader people problems.