Thursday, November 1, 2012

Email and UC - the Moose on the Table

Catchy title, huh? Well, that was the topic of this week's UCStrategies podcast. I have often wondered why email doesn't have a more central role to play with UC. Email is just so core to our daily workflows, you'd think it would be a big driver. I'm sure if email had been invented today, it would look a lot different, and certainly be voice-enabled.

The podcast discussion was lively, and if you've been thinking about this "moose on the table" as well, then you'll enjoy our podcast. I was on the call but didn't contribute, and just wanted to share the link with you here. Don Van Doren moderated the call, and here's the link, from which you can either listen to the discussion or read the transcript.

For me, the most interesting takeaway was Blair Pleasant's comment about how social media platforms are part the landscape now, and I've been thinking the same thing. The group talked about some numbers showing how email activity far exceeds making phone calls, but also how email is on the decline. This is largely a generational thing - email still dominates for most of us, but not Millennials.

Their tool of choice is social media and all the short form modes of text communication. Once social media becomes more tightly integrated with UC, I think that shift will accelerate - and at some point, these tools will become voice enabled. When that happens, it will be time to ask some serious questions about the long term value of email. Gee, maybe I should have jumped into the conversation!

1 comment:

Joshua Goldbard said...

Jon,

We think about this a lot at 2600hz. The evolving role of email is something that I personally think is broken. Email is really a giant to-do list, and it's not built (at least the major email clients I know of) for the way users consume their communications. I don't expect to go in my email to listen to my voicemail, but it's nice that it's there (same thing with faxes).

I actually think that there's room for modifying messages for different mediums (full message for email, tagline for SMS, photo for photoboard style messaging), but it has to take context into account and where Geofencing might be able to play a great role.

The fascinating thing about UC in general is the meshing of all these diverse technologies, and we're living in what is perhaps the most interesting UC period yet.

Since 2600hz is all about the integrations, how do you think we can use messaging to better enable mobile workforces?

Cheers,
Joshua

Community Manager of http://www.2600hz.com