Email is the future

• "Email is a communication tool, not a collaboration tool"
• "Email is the on-ramp and off-ramp to collaboration"
• "At Google, we have a 15 Gb limit on our inboxes"
• "Collaboration is a smarter way of doing what people have been doing in email all along"

Email is being mentioned in almost all sessions at the Collaborative Technologies Conference, happening in Boston right now. Some presenters make excuses that their organisation still uses email, others see email as an aspect of collaboration that has to be taken into account when designing solutions and processes.

In the near and medium term, we will continue to struggle with email. How to integrate it. Even how to understand the nature of it - and how behaviour changes when we increasingly use collaborative workspaces in parallel with email.

Email is about messages, but the versatility of email means that it can represent documents, tasks, activities, events, links and even social gestures. The inbox is a strong paradigm that we see reflected in other applications.

I believe that the solution to email is to embrace the concept and work it into collaborative workspaces as a view. Sometimes I want to see everything as activities, sometimes as documents, sometimes as keywords - and sometimes as messages.

Tags: CTC2006 collaboration email collaborative workspaces Google

Comments

[Ben Poole]

15GB limit on mail?!? Wow. I've worked for my current employer almost 11 years. My mailfile is 44MB. Yes, MEGAbytes. And that includes the mailfile "design" (it's Lotus Notes).

Ouch. 15GB seems insanely large.