Enterprise: Email is Dead ?

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

As posted previously, Deerfield (creators of VisNetic MailFlow) will be exhibiting at ITEC Detroit in October. If you want the exact details - you can find them here. So today I discover an interesting article titled "If Email is Dead, Then Why is there So Much of it?". The article was penned by Ron Miller and posted on the ITEC site. It basically references an article written by John Dvorak for PC Magazine. The long-time columnist and self-acclaimed expert (if you met him you'd know what I mean, in a good way) goes on to list nine reasons why he thinks that email is dead.

Miller puts his own spin on it however - making a case that organizations are drowning in it, thus reducing its effectiveness as a reliable business communication tool. Miller gives an example of the challenges facing organizations wrt eDiscovery, whereby all correspondence on a particular issue may need to be retrieved. He advocates using more social networking tools in lieu of email to help alleviate the pain, tools such as blogs and wikis. He concludes his article by stating " Email may not be dead, but it's not resting very comfortably and we need to find ways to alleviate its pain".

I would say that largely I agree with Ron and John, but here's my take; a primary reason that email is failing in the workplace is because we are using the wrong tools to manage it. Monolithic email clients such as Outlook were not designed to be a collaborative enterprise email client. The collaboration capabilities of the Outlook's of the world are in their ability to manage calendars, contacts, etc - the GroupWare functions. Ironically however, - not the mail stream. I compare this to an accounting system whereby instead of having a centralized accounting system, every staff member keeps their own Excel spreadsheet on their desktop computer. What an unmanageable mess that would be! Same result when you use standalone email clients to manage a corporate mail stream; silos of non-syncronized, decentralized, black holes of correspondence.

VisNetic Mailflow was created from the ground up to be an enterprise grade email management / customer service solution. With a multi-user, web-based interface sitting on top of a SQL database, any and all email correspondence is centrally stored, archived, and backed up - and collaboratively available to all parties with the proper rights within the organization. If you are struggling with email - you really need to take a look at MailFlow... like maybe come visit us at ITEC Detroit. BTW - we have plenty of free passes if you are interested :)

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