Conversationware

Talk about email storage to IT managers and they tend to start going this funny colour. Users can’t seem to manage their Inbox apparently, although not the exact words they use.

This has come up time and again, where, on behalf of the user experience, it is up to me to persuade I.T that voice messages have to reside in the email store.

During the conversation you can see this assume huge proportions in the minds eye, and I always show my own mailbox to calm them down……a bit.

So its an area of interest.

I just saw that in my personal email, on Google, that I’ve used 93MB of 6 Gig. In a year and a half.

So I check my Exchange work mailbox, I now have ALL historical emails saved locally - although I’m good at deleting very large emails first - I have 2.5 Gig, in 3 years. Including unified messaging.

By my calculations then Google are effectively giving me unlimited storage. They seem to put it up every month, I could easily have 7 years of email before deleting anything at all. Which is surely what most people would ever need. Or am I behind the multimedia times.

You gotta love that.

It’s Funny when you see someone try to recall an email.

Of course, the recall function serves only to highlight the original email to be read more closely, just to see where the rickett has been dropped, and how loud the clang was.

Another example of a terrible email mistake here at email tide

In my mind’s eye I can now see lots of Journalists flicking through a ‘deed poll’ search on google - seeing how much it would cost to change their name to Gordon Brown.

Don’t do it Jane!

There are three Matt Lambert’s in the UK around the technology field, one at Microsoft and one at a telecoms company. So, I do get voicemails from people I’ve never heard of every now and again….although nothing interesting seemlingly. But the more people you are ‘acquainted’ with, the less well you might know them, and this is going to happen more often.

In the comments in the linked article, there is a Thunderbird plugin that is designed with the ‘are you sure you want to send this’ button built in. Not bad, but possibly subject to the similar address blindness after a while.

What this highlights (again) is the fact that Email is a fairly blunt tool with which to be handling sensitive documents.

Surely there must be some enterprise 2.0 software that could handle a central repository, and sharing mechanism for messages, without overloading the user with yet more passwords. It makes you wonder if any other legal companies have gone with Google Docs for this?

Is Sharepoint the right vehicle - I’ve heard varying reports. I’ve got another Avanquest training session on this next week, perhaps it will sink in this time.

Talking of Passwords, methinks it is worth another look at OpenID again.

When I looked for free web based email, I knew Gmail was going to be the best option.

With huge amounts of storage, accessible from my various PC’s, Spam filters and desktop notifications (so I don’t have to check for new mail, which is the most important), plus Gtalk Instant Messaging on the same login - so it proved.

Thus, when I wanted to have separate ‘blog’ email, I took a look at Google Apps (it’s free, so why not).

Google Apps is Gmail, but with your own domain - (e.g. mail is sent to name@company.com) but with all the above benefits, and more. Being free, I think it’s great value, and even at the premier edition at $50 per user per year - compared to the cost of running premises based equivalents is a no brainer.

Setting it up does mean you need your own domain, and access to the control panel to follow google’s instructions in moving the Email MX records…..it’s easier than it sounds though, and knowing someone who can help is useful.

On first impressions, it was good. But last year…..

I had the problem of trying to access two separate Gmail accounts from the same machine - it turned out to be very unwieldy flicking from account to account and notifications weren’t as timely if I wasn’t logged in.

It’s amazing how the little things prevent you from using and being completely happy with software.

Recently however, Google Apps and Gmail have both moved to supporting IMAP, and my problems have been solved. It’s brilliant!

One of the most useful additional applications is Docs - great for sharing information between boundaries….accessible from anywhere. I haven’t worked out my three different calendars yet, but there are apparently synching apps available.

I’m now using Thunderbird to receive and send mail from multiple gmail accounts (as well as a separate email account for work!). I can still be logged in to my primary gmail account (personal) for most of the day.

With all the above facilities, Google Apps is aimed at companies - but I always wondered whether companies would get over the trust issue. That is, trusting Google to look after their email.

I figured for my own part that if Google let any information go, their share price would slide, and therefore they had more to lose than I did.

There is an extremely interesting article here, showing a Legal company have made exactly the same decision.

Email server, Software, support, Spam software, archiving, the list of savings just goes on.

If you don’t need to support a LAN to run documents and email (with failover support), this tends to help free up both funds and the staff from looking after it, not to mention users who can literally work anywhere with mobile broadband.

It has to be worth most small companies time in having a look at this, and if Legal companies are happy to trust their customer’s information, then that shouldn’t stop anyone.

I caught this post from Nick Fera it struck me that many of us are still experimenting with the best ways to handle email.

When you spend a large part of a day out of the office (it varies whether I set OOF), don’t you find that by the end of that day, you will still have processed everything?  It happens to me a lot.

This is strange, because when I’m away from my desk and not on Instant Messaging, then I would expect more email, not less.

I’ve been mulling some reasons for this ‘disconnect’. Perhaps all or none of these are true for you?

1. By the time you get back, some other, helpful, people have already responded to the email reducing your workload

2. By the time you get back, the emailer has found an answer on their own and has emailed again to say so

3. You haven’t been generating outbound email, so therefore (obviously) you  have less inbound responses to deal with

4. The session is more productive when doing email in batches, because it’s not using interuption time (up to 15 mins to re-focus on the original task I hear)

The extrapolated theory then could be as follows

“helpful people, those more willing to communication instantly, get stuck in email threads”

To be more productive, be less helpful?

- or to put it another way, perhaps this is why service levels in your favourite company having been dropping since email was invented.

Are voice calls quicker than using email? I would say only if you know they’re available.

I caught sight of a post by chip griffin, arguing that the stuff he saw at the defrag conference - which seems to be a collaboration technology show - wasn’t compelling enough to replace email.

Email is simple and ubiquitous, so why replace it. I think that’s a contentious point - and probably purposefully so. These bloggers eh, always stirring the pot. As if I didn’t come across his missive through RSS.

But Chip looks from the point of view of a user - and I happen to agree with that point. Complicated isn’t good.

My own view is that email is great when it’s one to one, and when the extent of the interaction is easily defined. Question - Answer - Done.

But Email can go horribly wrong where there are multiple parties, or where an ongoing conversation is required.

So - what problems are there with email? Here’s a few I can think of, feel free to suggest more.

1. Where can I look to see progress around a topic that involves a few of us - where can anyone look to see progress? I know….lets send another email and ask.
2. Email is fraught with the following problem: If I email you with a  question about the project and you haven’t responded - who’s responsibility is it that the action didn’t get done? It’s mine of course….but email blurs the lines and makes it difficult. “He didn’t get back to me” is something you hear over and over
3. Email hides what is important, and gives you what is urgent (your newest emails) instead.
4. If someone joins the conversation late, where can they look to get up to speed

Have I missed anything?

In short, I don’t think the email problem is actually a myth, but just what we do about it isn’t exactly clear. I thought it was going to be SharePoint - but from what I read, the jury is still out there too.

There are no shortage of new innovative companies looking at the issue. Anything topic based catches the eye. From that acquisition of Parlano, perhaps Microsoft still think there is more work to be done around collaboration too.

The google email blog is always useful to keep up on new development - I’ve said before that this product has the potential to disrupt the market and gives SME’s excellent reasons to not spend a fortune on email software.

I could bang on about why I switched my personal mail to google very quickly, but they’ve done a silly video to help explain. Funnily enough, it’s on You Tube and not google video. (more…)

This post is incomplete, but then so is the industry

I’ve mentioned before that the key to understanding Unified Communications (all of it) is the software interfaces presented to the user. (You may notice I don’t mention voip at all in the following, it’s about users).

Unless the user is going to adopt functionality, there is almost no point deploying it…..and by definition the more interfaces there are, the more difficult adoption will be (how many training course will users go on).

Once the required interfaces are defined, it’s so much easier to put the technologies in the right place, or in the right box, so to speak, and so I have been framing business requirements around the GUI.

The reason I’m bothering here is that I have met with customers who have in front of them very interesting new products - but they overlap so much, and so how does one decide?

It can be as tricky as hell, as current comms software technology on offer includes

Messaging

• Email
• Voicemail
• Fax
• Text Messaging

Real Time Conversation interface,

• Instant Messaging - are you at your desktop
• Telephony - are you on the phone
• Conferencing, Audio dial in, dial out, desktop sharing, webinars
• Video conferencing, are you at your desktop

You can see overlaps wherever you look with UC - but there will be ‘at least’ two interfaces for users - as the ‘button’ requirements are different for messaging, to that of real time.

Messaging buttons; - Address, Send, receive, store, mark as urgent, copy, forward, and so forth

Real Time buttons; - Receive contact, Make Contact, whether IM, call, or video, include someone else in the conversation, transfer, desktop share, present, record, and so forth

• Messaging interfaces are reasonably well defined
• Real Time Conversation interfaces are in their infancy
• Personal Contact Handling isn’t well defined

However, for framing Unified Communication discussions and decisions, each user will probably have at least the first two initial interfaces for personal productivity.

A third interface should exist, but doesn’t yet (?)

Personal contact handling

• This doesn’t yet exist as a recognised ‘desktop based user interface’ category - although network based Grand Central is a good start in showing what will be possible
• Call routing and handling, where should calls go, onto which device, at what time
• Planning - willingness to engage, calendar integration, - Iotum is interesting
• Call processing, what happens to the caller if you can’t take the call
• More loosely defined is a meta directory, routing and capture application such as that delivered by Corebridge - because contact information pervades around all communications solutions, (and existing applications).

It isn’t clear where functionality to control personal contact handling will be interfaced by the user, - most of the above is handled at premises based system admin level currently - but it makes sense if all features to determine the inbound call routing for today, all end up in one interface, (if not provided by a single backend system) to be controlled by the user instead of Admin.

This interface could yet still be provided by a hosted system provider, overlaying and complementing existing site number and mobile number implementations - instead of replacing them completely.

The final interface, enabling existing applications with (the same) communications

As well as providing the primary interface for specific channel technology (show me all my received faxes, calls, emails) All the technology channels above ‘may be’ suitable to ‘enable’ an existing user interface, by line of business - Email a Contact, Fax a contact, Call a contact, record a contact, Text a contact

By way of a small example, although fax is a single technology channel above and sounds simple enough - fax integration can get interesting when requirements appear on the horizon to integrate into Exchange Outlook, or Lotus Notes, then to the telephone system (TDM or IP), then to unified messaging (forward the fax to a local machine) then SAP or Oracle line of business applications, then back end integration to hard copy Multi Function Devices and onwards archiving to the industry flavour EDM.

Nobody said it was simple.

At this point, Microsoft Sharepoint usually comes up in the conversation as a replacement interface to all the existing applications, so UC takes on another interface….and so it goes on, much to the user’s consternation.

There’s a play on words about ‘users’ being addicted to existing interfaces, but that would be cheap.

How to choose

Enabling lots of interfaces with a technology flavour tends to point towards best of breed technologies instead of an all-in-one UC solution.

Generalising: wide ranging applications just don’t go very deep in my experience, and ultimately they don’t generate enough ROI, and therefore sales, to justify the development resource to integrate into every interface (converge) that may be required in every industry.

All in one solutions, may be fine in small organisations where the user requirements are very focussed and not wide ranging.

In larger organisations with wider ranges of activites, each messaging ,or real time conversation, ‘technology’ should support the most possible interfaces you can think of, (and multiple interfaces concurrently).

This almost defines a best of breed requirement for each technology - particularly when in a sector that is in acquistion mode - and if you are adopting UC, it won’t be long before you’re in a sector likely to be acquisition minded according to some sources -technology adopting sectors see most acqusition.

So when you acquire a major competitor next month and have to incorporate whatever they are doing into what you’re already doing, you want multi-interface communication products.

It’s plain that in these unforseen circumstances, functionality needs to be priced in a modular fashion, according to the interfaces required and the inherent value of doing so (each interface is it’s own individual case for each technology).

So, am I proposing that in order to have fewer user interfaces, there is a need for more technology boxes and management?

It’s debatable I suppose, but probably.

I’ve seen non specialist technology suppliers integrating essentially as ‘lip service’ to get the original deal, and then support evaporates over the period, especially when the next app needs enabling, and you have to start looking to replace again.

I’m lucky enough to see the best of breed technology I supply stick over a very much longer period.

If I’ve missed anything then it’s likely to be mobile - but that’s a longer conversation.

It’s been a long day, but is there anything else I haven’t thought about?

Not proper Unified Messaging. But I’ve promoted Unified Messaging for so long - 12 years and counting, and I have to say that the market did recently seem relatively cooler towards the subject until Microsoft made their Unified Commmunications announcements.

So, Microsoft’s approach is a good thing, but still, from being a hot subject a few years ago, there is more shrugging of shoulders than there used to be.

I detect that attitudes stem from just how much email is being received by key people - and it is those very people who normally most benefit from productivity and increased levels of service that Unified Messaging can deliver.

I can see the thought process…”I get way too many emails, and you want to stuff my mailbox full of voicemail?” It’s a false argument, as everyone has to handle voicemail anyway, so their real point is that currently, voicemail is instantly recognisable and can therefore be prioritised.

The worst result of bad unified messaging is a ‘lumping’ of important voice messages into a sea of email dross

Therefore - to mitigate this issue for potential users, make sure your new unified messaging system distinguishes voicemail from email properly. This can be done in a few ways;

• When looking at your Outlook/Notes inbox, the voicemail should show a phone icon instead of a straightforward email envelope
• There should be a “This is a Voicemail” type statement in the subject field, and the number of the person who left you the message.
• Voicemail should have notifications by phone, and especially SMS (if no mobile email available) as an overlay to their email box or desk phone, to include the sender’s info! (helping users prioritise)
• When users dial in by phone, the UM system should separate voice, fax and email into separate queues that the user can choose to access. Most people will choose the voicemail queue to action first.

Better still, why not explore how to get rid of email overload, and start reducing inappropriate traffic through email. This is how I got interested in new media solutions

I take this quote from Business Week Article from a Dresdner Kleinwort Web 2.0 technology pioneer,

Thill says using the wiki, along with blogs and instant messaging, has cut down his e-mail use by at least 75%, and his colleagues have reported similar results. Now, he only needs to go a single wiki page to view all the key metrics for 80 Web sites monitored by his department. Whereas sifting and sorting that data from 80 sources could otherwise take weeks, he says, through the wiki, each user only needs “about 30 seconds” to plug in his or her data and make it immediately available to the whole team, all of whom are promptly notified by instant message or e-mail.

All apart from the email notification bit - amazing how few people use newsreaders - this would hugely ease life for the usersphere. I’m not sure 75% is achievable for all of us, but I seriously think 50% of my emails are inappropriate to the medium…sent and received.

I don’t suppose many companies have taken much notice of Gmail, google’s email application. In terms of how relevant it may be to them, the notion must intitially be alien - after all, security is such a barrier for enterprises when considering hosted applications.

However, with the ability of google mail to support a companies existing email addresses - instead of user@gmail.com, companies should perhaps then look at the costs that can be saved, here - $8M per year is pause for thought! Plus, gmail is even available on your blackberry.

A recent article in the economist (which is premium content) provides further arguments, and Rod Boothby looks in more detail.

The ability for gmail to deliver instant disaster recovery is for me probably the most persuasive of arguments for smaller to medium companies.

The fact that gmail also reduces the difficulty and cost of introducing collaboration technology (IM) will also be important to organisations, as the Return On Investment case for collaboration is rarely instantly visible, and has resulted in slow adoption. 

This article is the crux of google’s disruptive technology at work, which is a huge competitive advantage.

Disruptive technology happens where an incumbent supplier makes things so feature rich (complex), and charges, or induces costs that are more than customers are really prepared to pay.

The popularity of outsourcing means that companies are finding IT hard to manage themselves, now we’re an ‘always on’ society, gmail makes things a bit easier.

There is something cynical that I just can’t get away from regards email, and it is this, ”When someone needs some information to complete a task, and they email YOU, who’s fault is it when the task doesn’t get done?” 

There should be a name for people who get this wrong. 

It is perhaps not a mystery as to how we got into information overload, as email is just the most user friendly, accessible and powerful of tools. But as this article shows, from Nick Fera, by referring to some excellent source material, we’re probably near being overwhelmed by our inbox.

Parlano is definitely onto something with their topic based communications platform. The conversation is what is central and consistent, and it uses an interface people already know how to use. Microsoft LCS. Unifying communications summed up. By seeing which conversations are updated at a glance, we users could prioritise properly again, heaven.

If you look at email in comparison, the conversation is all over the inbox, cluttered and obscure. I often said that I used email as my To Do list, but I just can’t see what I need to do any more.

Perhaps we just don’t know how to use email properly - but the answer to any knotty problem usually means we eventually find something that is more intuitive to use. Personally, I can’t wait.

Other people, like Mike Gotta have linked to this decision making tree around communicating, and its thought provoking as to what tool we should use for what purpose. I can’t help thinking we haven’t yet seen the other half of the toolbox yet though.