Enterprise e-mail gets pumped
…A lot depends on how e-mail evolves, Hobert says.
In five years, we will still call it e-mail — but only because it is hard to get people to change nomenclature, Hobert says. Nevertheless, business users will be working with e-mail in a very different way than they do today.
What users are witnessing is the morphing of e-mail from the primary communications tool on the desktop to the primary tool to coordinate communications from multiple sources such as RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, IMs, and voice. Instead of opening an attachment from a Word file, for example, today’s e-mail clients simply use e-mail to communicate that a file is located somewhere. The e-mail tells the user where to find the file and provides a link to, say, Microsoft Sharepoint or Lotus ClickR.
“This promotes best practices, by putting content in a shared but secure repository and using e-mail just to communicate that it is there,” Hobert says.