I’m familiar with a multibillion dollar international corporation that uses an excel spreadsheet to communicate between divisions.
Not email or slack or teams or the telephone. An excel spreadsheet.
The left column is where one division enters a message, and the right column is where the other division responds. For a new message, you start a new row. The file lives on a network drive.
But… why?
Bypassing communication archiving requirements? Years ago, I worked for a company that logged all IM, etc, that occurred in a companies intranet. There were laws that required all communications to be preserved for certain industries.
This sounds like a workaround to avoid chat history
Generally bypassing these auditing requirements is a punishable offense. I worked for a firm that was SEC regulated and you might be shocked at how much effort was expended on ensuring these policies weren’t being circumvented.
“We cracked the case open when we discovered their chats in ‘troubleshooting_not_secret_comms.xls’. They tried to cover their tracks through regular deletion, and they would have gotten away with it if not for one neglected PC in a disused office running an unsupervised copy of Norton Backup 1990.”
Because that’s the way they’ve done it since 1987, and the CEO doesn’t like change.
Since it’s not mentioned in the article: the device is a Nokia 9200 series Communicator. Had a perfectly functional SMS app for its era, of course.
Nokia Communicators were absolutely rad. Had a 9110 and it was incredible.
