Spike’s new app reimagines collaborative email

If you struggle to manage your emails effectively and want to incorporate tasks and notes into your daily workflow, you might want to try something that allows you to do all of your tasks in one place

Israel-based email and workflow productivity company Spike has announced updates to its conversational email app.

It has launched a suite of communication and workflow capabilities, including tasks, to-dos, notes, and documents, combining productivity tools and email into one inbox.

Instead of having several applications manage your communications, this update consolidates everything into a single place. As many actionable tasks arrive by email, you can now manage them directly from your inbox.

By adding notes, tasks, and collaboration capabilities to the app, real-time collaboration and sync can occur across devices. You can view the status of tasks and update shared notes and documents.

Conversational email shows email threaded messages in chat-format instead of showing headers and signatures for each email in the thread.

The tool is intended to show conversation-like messaging with collaboration and workflow features such as task creation and note-taking. It also has calendar functionality and searches.

The app’s chat functionality means that users can chat directly from their email inbox on a one-to-one, or group chat feature. The tool is available for mobile, desktop, and web. It has a free plan and a pro version, costing $5.99 per user per month.

If you have been used to using Outlook on your mobile for some time, you might find the features of Spike confusing. Nothing is where you expect it to be.

I found that, even though I connected to my hosted Exchange account through the app, I could not see any of my hosted tasks. All I could see through the app was any task I had initially created on the app.

I did find the notes feature useful, and creating notes and tasks was simple and synchronized well. It was easy to create a messaging group and to categorize each group of people I messaged.

Dvir Ben-Aroya, Spike co-founder and CEO, said: 

“Up until now, Spike has primarily been rethinking how email should work by turning legacy email into chat-like conversations. Today, in our latest update, Spike adds tasks, notes and real-time collaboration into the world’s most powerful email inbox to set the stage for how we will get work done in the future — together, in one feed, in real-time.”

The company recently raised $8 million in Series A funding from venture capital company Insight Partners, and it has raised a total of nearly $16 million to date.

As we move to permanent and flexible work from home environments, being able to do everything you need to from one unified inbox is compelling.

Will I persevere with the tool? It is too early to tell yet. But if you want to simplify your life Spike is certainly worth a try.

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