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Thinking out of the inbox

• Tags:
• Forrester,
• Tcp,
• Evolve,
• Emails

Cath Everett ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 26 Jun 2007 12:22 BST

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...not least because such services are currently more expensive than equivalent on-premises offerings, this situation is expected to alter as prices come down.

The final piece in the jigsaw is increasing demand for email management systems as a result of the growing regulatory burden. This has led to a rising interest in records management, which includes emails, not least in case audit trails of business activity are required by a court of law.

Into the longer term, however, the use of email is expected to flatten out and change, although it will not go away — just as paper and voicemail hasn't.

Clive Longbottom, a service director at Quocirca, explained: "The massive usage of email as a personal means of communication will plateau as users move more towards IM, VoIP, web-sharing and Web 2.0, such as social-networking sites. Within the business sphere, it'll tend to revert to a more formal usage for the exchange of documents needed for things like contract negotiation and as a one-to-many distribution system."

But this does not necessarily mean to say that email will lose its popularity, simply that it will become one text communication tool of many as the number of interactions and the modalities users employ to perform different tasks increases.

As a result, the challenge for users will be to determine which of the modalities is the most appropriate for the task in hand, while organisations will need to get to grips with how to best exploit this growing communications literacy for business purposes.

But vendors such as IBM and Microsoft are already jumping on this particular bandwagon by assembling collaboration platforms for information workers. These comprise a unified set of software services, which include messaging capabilities, such as email and calendaring; team collaboration, such as work spaces and document repositories; real-time communications, such as IM and videoconferencing; and social-networking tools, such as blogs and wikis.

"The important thing is that they won't be discrete communications modalities but will bleed into each other, and the idea of presence is the key here, so you can see where people are. Currently the notion of deploying or managing these modalities in a unified fashion is fairly rudimentary, but we're at the start of a drive to unified communications, which will take about five years," said Cain.

Nonetheless, a study by Forrester Research indicates that 60 percent of the businesses that it surveyed in North America and Europe have such unified communications technology on their agenda for 2007, with nine percent identifying it as a critical priority.

But, while the range of communications modalities is unlikely to increase hugely, such tools will increasingly be integrated into business applications to provide contextual collaboration capabilities. This means that users will not need to toggle, for example, from their ERP package to their email box, as such functionality will be embedded.

Another important element of the ultimate vision, meanwhile, is that users have a single address to which messages are sent and received in appropriate format using a range of different software and devices.

Erica Driver, a principal analyst at Forrester, explained: "Email will become more unified with other forms of collaboration, meaning that a voicemail will turn into an email, or an instant message will turn into an email, based on user profiles and other criteria, like whether someone is in an important meeting."

This morphing of modalities means that the distinction between tools such as IM and email will start to blur, leading to the creation of a more seamless continuum.

For this to take place, however, there needs to be a much more integrated use of presence than is currently the case. One of the challenges here is that vendors persist in implementing presence protocols, such as SIP, in their own unique way to suit their own ends rather than those of the wider market.

Christopher Harris-Jones, a principal analyst at Ovum, explained: "The problem is that this requires agreement on standards across multiple industry sectors, but getting agreement across even one is a nightmare. At the moment, you can't even use different IM systems to communicate, so getting IM and SMS unified, for example, won't happen tomorrow."

Nonetheless, he believes that it is only a matter of time before such convergence will take place. "Email will remain a major and important method of communications, but it's a very exciting time and things are changing — and quickly," he concluded.

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