It seems that email is pronounced dead every time a new communication technology gets user traction. The last time around, IM and SMS were replacing email. Now Twitter and Facebook are taking over. Perhaps this is simply driven by our love-hate relationship with email and the fact that our inboxes have gotten so cluttered with useless and sometimes even harmful junk that we are all wishing for alternatives.

In reality, email is still evolving to better handle the vast amounts and types of information that it was never intended for. New social networking services, instant messaging, voice, video, presence, wikis, blogs, bookmarking, media sharing and micro blogging will eventually all come together and complement  each other, and email will definitely be part of the mix. Solutions such as Xobni or Baydin are leading the way to a more useful and better-integrated mailbox.

However, pulling all this new technology together will be a huge challenge. One of the biggest benefits of email is the fact that it is based on standards. The way clients and servers communicate and how messages are constructed and delivered is all well defined and vendor neutral.  Look at the mess with instant messaging. There are more than a dozen competing public IM networks out there (Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, Google, Skype, ICQ, etc.) and another set of private enterprise solutions (Lotus Sametime, Microsoft OCS, Cisco Jabber, etc.) all with no or limited inter-connectivity.  Now social networks are adding their own chat and messaging capabilities within their “walled gardens”.

For the end-user this means an ever increasing workload, to keep up with the flow of information while operating and maintaining a growing set of communication tools and platforms.

The old clunky inbox doesn’t look so bad now, does it?

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So is Twitter over-hyped or the future of electronic communication?

Don Dodge has written a great set of posts covering the phenomenon:

Many are saying Twitter has “jumped the shark”, is overhyped, ruined, and will never be the same.

Guy Kawasaki calls it “the most powerful marketing tool invented since TV,…and it’s free.

If you feel inspired by all of this and decide to start tweeting, perhaps first check out the Top 13 Twitter Don’ts published by PCMAG.

I’m still on the Twitter sidelines, trying to figure out how to possibly manage another information channel blaring at me 24×7, but just in case I reserved a spot.

I’m curious to hear other peoples thoughts on Twitter and how they use it, so please chime in.  Comments, tweet or emails are welcome.

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SharePoint has been a $1 Billion success for Microsoft although the platform is still struggling with enterprise-wide adoption due to integration and scalability issues. IBM Lotus is hoping to stop/slow SharePoint’s growth with Quickr’s enterprise grade scale (J2EE, WebSphere, DB2) and attractive web 2.0 features that tightly integrate not only with Lotus Notes 8 but also with Microsoft Office.

Enterprise customers will certainly benefit as this competition heats up.

Technorati Tags: quickr, sharepoint, content integration

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The new generation of knowledge workers now entering the workforce is already heavily reliant on UCC tools such as presence and IM, VoIP, and a whole arsenal of new social media services.

“Businesses that neglect to enable instant messaging and mobile collaboration will lose the talent to other, more technology savvy vendors who promote communication-enabled business processes.”

Elliot further points out that as companies invest in rich collaboration platforms from IBM Lotus and Microsoft there is a need to buy also the tools to manage and secure email and IM.

Technorati Tags: uc2, unified communication collaboration, sametime, ocs

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“New York attorneys ordered Hirsch to provide records of the content of the messages exchanged on TXTmob during the convention, as well as the identification of people who sent and received messages, the time the messages were sent for the duration of the event, and a list of people who used the service during the event.”

Hirsch is fighting to protect the privacy of the users of his service, but it is becoming clear that under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, text-messages and for that matter all other electronic communications are admissible in court.

This raises some serious privacy concerns and makes you want to think twice of twittering about your life’s every moment.

The even bigger question is how companies must and can comply with discovery requests that are as broadly defined as seen in this case. The archiving of email messages is already adding a huge expense to corporate IT budgets. In case of litigation, the cost of retrieval and e-discovery of this archived content is often even bigger.

Companies should certainly consider these issues when leveraging new collaborative technologies.

Technorati Tags: txtmob, twitter, text-messaging, tad hirsch

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“Sametime is a feature-rich environment for network-based collaboration and conferencing. It consists of the Sametime Server and client-based Sametime Connect software. Users can message each other via Sametime Connect or a Web browser, or from within Lotus Notes. Sametime Connect also can be launched directly and easily from within Microsoft Office and Outlook. All these points of entry worked well in the lab.

Sametime’s messaging interoperated seamlessly via IBM-supplied gateways with AIM, GoogleTalk and XCP.

We unreservedly and heartily recommend IBM Lotus Sametime for IM in a corporate setting. It is feature-rich, intuitive to use, highly scalable and platform neutral.”

Strangely – Microsoft opted not to participate in the review.

Technorati Tags: Sametime, Enterprise IM

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IBM is expanding Lotus Sametime from a single product into a whole product family consisting of:

• IBM Lotus Sametime Entry 8.0
• IBM Lotus Sametime Standard 8.0
• IBM Lotus Sametime Advanced 8.0
• IBM Lotus Sametime “Unified Telephony”

In addition, IBM is joining the already crowded web-conferencing market through the acquisition of WebDialogs. This acquisition is most likely aimed at extending Sametime’s robust behind-the-firewall capabilities onto the public Internet, putting IBM in direct competition with CISCO/WebEx, Citrix/GotoMeeting and Microsoft/LiveMeeting.

Microsoft announced an equally interesting coopetition agreement with Cisco. Both companies CEO’s acknowledged in a joint public discussion that their customers are demanding more flexibility and interoperability when choosing unified communication solutions.

They’re saying, ‘Give me the choice. Don’t give me the all or nothing choice,”‘ Ballmer said, adding that he was seeking “respectful competition” with Cisco.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Lotus, Unified Communication, Lotus Sametime

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This comes somewhat as a surprise for two reasons:

Novell had been making headlines earlier this year over their controversial licensing arrangements with Microsoft, signaling a closer relationship with Redmond. The deal with IBM is clearly directed to counter Microsoft by offering a cheaper alternative to Exchange server and Office on the desktop.

Secondly, what is happening to Groupwise, Novell’s own desktop suite? There have been some recent rumors that Novell may discontinue any future development on the product, which were promptly denied by Novell’s Groupwise Director of engineering.

It should be interesting to see what the future will bring. It certainly seems like a great move by IBM to further leverage their investment in Linux.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Novell, SUSE, Lotus Notes, Groupwise, Microsoft

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What comes as somewhat of a surprise is that many companies state an insufficient business case as the main reason for not deploying corporate IM, outweighing concerns over cost, security and content control. The article notes:

“IM and presence are today where e-mail was some time around 1995. Back then, you could still find people who were not convinced of the efficacy of e-mail in improving communications and who simply couldn’t come up with a business case for deploying it – today, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who does not believe in the value of e-mail for business communications.”

I agree with Michael’s assertion that corporate IM can provide a real competitive advantage if used in an integrated and innovative fashion.

“Second, organizational decision-makers will need to be proactive in understanding what IM and presence can do. As I’ve said before, e-mail’s ubiquity means that organizations can no longer gain any sort of competitive advantage from it. However, that is not the case with IM and presence – innovative use of IM and presence can speed organizational decision-making, provide better customer service, etc., in ways that can provide real competitive advantage simply because many of your competitors are probably not yet using these capabilities.“

As noted in previous posts, enterprise IM is here to stay. Companies must look beyond “chat” to realize the benefits of presence integration and instant collaboration.

Technorati Tags: Enterprise IM, Osterman Research, Unified Communication

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In a press release published last week, Gartner forecasts that IM will become the medium of choice for voice, video and text chat by the end of 2011.

For many knowledge workers, instant messaging (IM) is as critical as having access to a telephone or to e-mail and enterprises that haven’t already done so should start incorporating IM into their critical business processes immediately, Gartner said today. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2011, IM will be the de facto tool for voice, video and text chat with 95 percent of workers in leading global organisations using it as their primary interface for real-time communications by 2013. The worldwide market for enterprise IM is forecast to grow from $267 million in 2005 to $688 million in 2010.

The analyst firm further predicts that predominant consumer IM services such as AOL, Yahoo! and MSN Messenger will be replaced by behind-the-firewall Enterprise IM solution that provide secure and reliable communications within the enterprise while connecting to the public networks through monitored federation services. During the transition, Enterprise IM is expected to grow from it current 25% to 100% penetration within the next four years.

Gartner also touches on some of the issues surrounding security and compliance that are consistent with the recommendations I made in a previous blog post.

Technorati Tags: Gartner, Forrester, Enterprise IM, instant messaging, sametime, lcs, IM hygiene

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