Collaborative Thinking

E-Mail Search: Introducing MarkMail

Interesting approach (per Peter). But some points to consider regarding any enterprise application:

• This is not new - expertise automation systems (e.g., Tacit) have attempted mine e-mail as a source of corporate knowledge for some time. Vendors that try to suggest relationship networks do this as well (e.g., Contact Networks). Microsoft's Knowledge Network will include some analysis of e-mail patterns.
• There are credible concerns regarding privacy and confidentiality. As I recall, in some countries, privacy regulations prevent mining of e-mail. Even without specific guidance, management should be concerned that employees will see this as unwarranted surveillance without proper limitations. For instance, mining the contact information (sender, receiver) vs. the content body, might be more acceptable.
• "Knowledge in e-mail' is a very old argument - valid - but perhaps more elusive than one might imagine. As our channels become more fragmented (e-mail, workspaces, instant messaging, blogs, wikis, etc.), the challenge becomes exponentially more difficult as "threads" cross channels. e-Mail however remains (for better or worse) the poison of choice for most corporate communication.

Some vertical or situational applications around this technology might evolve as well. For instance: use of MarkMail as part of a discovery process (per legal or regulatory investigation), mining customer e-Mails sent into the Call Center to discovery common trends (e.g., complaints on a product). 

E-mail. Why?

• It's semi-structured, and we love working against semi- and un-structured information. E-mail has some clear metadata (e.g., author, subject, send-date) and plenty of free text, both in the body copy and in the metadata fields (e.g., thread topic) themselves.

• It's easily converted to XML.

• It's ubiquitous. Everybody uses it.

• There are lots of free, public mailing lists that contain lots of valuable information -- on topics from wine to Tomcat and everything in between.

• Most important, e-mail is -- as Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital once said -- the new corporate knowledgebase.

To expand the last point. If I told you that you could go to one place -- and only place -- to learn about a company, where would you go? To their corporate data warehouse? To their knowledgebase? To their financial systems? To their sales and CRM systems?

Personally, I'd go to their e-mail. Despite years of attempts to systemize it, knowledge has eluded capture and evaded knowledge management systems. Knowledge, it seems, instead resides in e-mail and collaboration systems. Through e-mail I can find lots of important quantitative information (mailed around as spreadsheet attachments) but more importantly, the color and commentary that goes along with it. As Mark Logic's Jason Hunter once put it: "I can see the movie (the data), and the subtitles that go along with it."

E-mail is the one-stop shop for information inside most organizations. So why not demonstrate our power on e-mail, we thought? So we did.

The other nice thing about e-mail is that it has additional idiosyncrasies that let us show-off more of our power.

• Included text and conversation threads. MarkMail does a great job of eliminating duplicate inclusions and re-building a conversation from a series of emails.

• Attachments. We love documents and people email them all the time. MarkMail has some very nice -- and sexy -- ways of handling e-email attachments.

Mark Logic CEO Blog: Mark Logic Redefines E-Mail Search: Introducing MarkMail

Will Social Features Make Email Sexy Again? - WSJ.com

I have more faith that consumer-centric e-mail providers and newcomers (such as Zimbra, recently acquired by Yahoo!) will innovate more rapidly around e-mail than traditional enterprise software providers. Why? Vendors with huge market share that derive a tremendous amount of revenue from a particular product are less likely to undertake the type of transformation that might fundamentally threaten their existing financial model. Why would IBM or Microsoft do something that would undermine existing revenue streams? So instead, what we get in terms of re-inventing e-mail are pretty linear advancements. Release cycles also take too long with this products so the issue of agility and market responsiveness also comes into question. The linear progression of capabilities is not bad - but it is also not really moving the industry forward in any dramatic fashion. The one exception is mobile where I think traditional enterprise providers can still demonstrate innovation around mobile messaging.

Will enterprise software vendors look to infuse e-mail with more social features? Sure - part of what Microsoft has been showing with Knowledge Network touches on that aspect and vendors such as Tacit and Contact Networks have long "mined" e-mail to discover relationship patterns. The question is whether these larger vendors will look broadly across their portfolio of products and take a platform approach to improve messaging across channels rather than one stove-pipe at a time.

That's what makes something like Twitter so interesting. It's not locked into e-mail, IM, etc - any end-point can participate in the communication stream. Senders and receivers pick their own end-point to interact with the platform. The platform can have various filters added to "cull out" a particular conversation stream from the overall flow. I have a Twitter add-on to Outlook, Google Talk, Skype, Facebook and so on in addition to SMS and a web page front-end. This type of channel-switching hub works quite well and represents an architecture I can envision within an enterprise setting. But to do that, large vendors might hesitate if the result negatively impacted their existing revenue models from traditional products.

Innovation will always be stifled when decision-makers are unwilling to attack, as a competitor would, the very products or services that brought them to prominence in the first place.

Yahoo executives describe the company's 250 million email users globally as the "world's largest dormant social network." In recent years, the Sunnyvale, Calif., concern has added some features that allow individuals to see when friends who are also Yahoo users are online and to send instant messages to them without clicking over to Yahoo's instant-messaging software.

In a mock-up of additional social-networking features it is considering, Yahoo imagines users creating profile pages with such data as their birthdays. On their email welcome screens, individuals might be greeted by lists of friends celebrating birthdays and friends who have sent them emails. Yahoo is considering offering users incentives to identify their friends, such as the ability to email larger files to people in their social networks.

One experimental Yahoo service known internally as "Friend Finder" analyzes a user's email traffic and indicates the friends with whom a user has strong email connections. It bases its findings on the volume of incoming and outgoing traffic and such factors as the frequency and speed with which the two parties respond to each other. The service works with emails sent by non-Yahoo users as well.

"I have very little doubt that email will be sexy again in a way that people will say, 'Holy Smokes, I didn't see this coming,'" says Yahoo Senior Vice President Brad Garlinghouse. He cites research from July indicating that only 20% of Yahoo email users are MySpace users and just 10% are on Facebook.

Will Social Features Make Email Sexy Again? - WSJ.com

Yahoo! Acquires Zimbra

Oh well, my bet was on Cisco to acquire Zimbra. Zimbra is one of the more innovative companies in the collaboration space. Karen covers the e-mail market in much more depth and her analysis of the acquisition is here. I have a tiered perspective on this deal but overall, positive:

Skeptical: Yahoo! has not been successful in past efforts to make customers out of traditional large enterprises (efforts in the portal and instant messaging space were disappointing). I'm not sure Zimbra alone will alter the decision-making criteria in large shops already invested in Microsoft or IBM. A credible option might be for Yahoo! to take a hands-off approach. Letting "Zimbra be Zimbra" will continue to make the technology attractive to open source enthusiasts. The more Yahoo! interjects itself into Zimbra's enterprise activities, the more distant large enterprises will become based on the lack of credibility on the part of Yahoo! concerning the enterprise software market.

Skeptical: There is a lot of general criticism towards Yahoo! over the past few months regarding organizational dynamics, market strategies and so on. I'm not sure this deal clarifies that bigger picture. Without further clarification - it could look like just another tangent.

Optimistic: In the SMB space this could play well.

Positive: In certain market segments (carrier/telco/isp's) and verticals (e.g., education), this will be well-received.

Positive: In the consumer space this will also be helpful to Yahoo! overall.

We will continue to make our software available for download and continue to offer Zimbra software and support as usual. This evolution further allows Zimbra to exceed its current (and future) customer expectations by leveraging the world class Yahoo! email experience and expertise. Partnering continues to be a very important pillar of Yahoo!'s strategy and this combination will have a renewed focus on partnerships across the globe including our 350+ VAR and hosting partners. The combination of the two companies will only enhance the level of commitment and support to our hosting partners who will remain a key focus for us moving forward.

Yahoo! is also a major proponent of open technologies and this combination is a further testament to how serious they are about their intentions. You will continue to see active participation in developer APIs and forums. We are committed to continue keeping the source open available for use and we will continue to offer the network version that will contain value added proprietary features on top of the open product.

Yahoo! Acquires Zimbra

Corporate E-Mail on the iPhone

New toys, old problems:

Clever Workarounds

Since the iPhone's arrival, Corporate America has reacted in various ways. Some have let employees connect to the corporate network but deny tech support for the devices. 

..... 

Cisco (CSCO) subsidiary WebEx wants to help executives empty their coat pockets and shed unwanted phones. On Aug. 29, the company will give corporate users a way to access Outlook e-mail via their iPhones with its PCNow service. In March, WebEx began offering PCNow as a way to remotely access computer documents, e-mail, and calendars via mobile devices. The service is now available for the iPhone and will let workers access e-mail, contacts, and files on their PCs. WebEx is offering a free one-month trial, and then the service costs $12.95 per month for one PC, with discounts for those who buy in volume or sign up for an annual contract.

WebEx joins a growing number of companies that have announced or demonstrated services to help iPhone users connect to corporate e-mail since the new smartphone was launched in June. Those companies include Visto, Synchronica, Funambol, and Sybase (SY). On August 2, Synchronica began offering a 60-day free trial of its Mobile Gateway 3.0 service that provides mobile synchronization between Microsoft Exchange and Apple's iPhone. Visto will begin a free trial of its service late in the third quarter of 2007. On Aug. 7, Sybase demonstrated the use of one of its iAnywhere products to sign into corporate e-mail, calendars, and address books at its user conference in Las Vegas but has not announced a product.

...

Licensing Opportunities

Ultimately, a better alternative for corporate users, says Dulaney, is for Apple to follow Nokia's lead and license Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync as Nokia (NOK) did so its Eseries devices could have wireless synchronization for calendar and contact data as well as mobile e-mail from compatible Exchange Servers. In July, BusinessWeek reported that Apple had been in discussions last year with Good Technology (MOT), a leading provider of secure mobile e-mail, about putting Good Mobile Messaging software on the iPhone, but those talks broke down (see BusinessWeek.com, 7/23/07, "Making the iPhone Mean Business").

Corporate E-Mail on the iPhone

E-mail stress - The Tip Of The Attention Iceberg?

The broader issue the article below raises is whether this type of worker stress is limited to e-mail? As XML feeds, instant messaging, blogs, social networking, presence-enabled applications and other social tools invade the workplace - how fragmented and disjointed will workers feel as they triage a growing number of communication channels and collaboration spaces all demanding their attention.

I would not jump to any melodramatic conclusion - some people adapt well and actually thrive within event-driven environments. Other workers will struggle until they learn new ways to cope and leverage tools that help filter, sort and prioritize work activities and manage interruptions. Technology to fix the problems that technology causes always lags a bit. The trend, to some extent, is unavoidable - creating a market opportunity for software vendors, consultants and perhaps even therapists I imagine...

More than a third said they thought they checked their inbox every 15 minutes and 64 per cent said they looked more than once an hour. When researchers fitted monitors to their computers, workers were found to be viewing e-mails up to 40 times an hour. About 33 per cent said they felt stressed by the volume of e-mails and the need to reply quickly. A further 28 per cent said they felt “driven” when they checked messages because of the pressure to respond. Just 38 per cent of workers were relaxed enough to wait a day or longer before replying.

E-mail stress keeps workers on edge of inbox - Times Online

... data from AOL and Opinion Research Corporation shows that Americans are increasingly "addicted" to checking their e-mail, with 59 percent of portable device users checking every single time an e-mail comes in and 83 percent of survey respondents checking e-mail every day on vacation.

All of this e-mail checking is not only stressing us out, it's cutting down on our productivity. Humans aren't quite as adept at multitasking as we'd like to think we are, and it takes us a long time to refocus; Microsoft recently said that workers took an average of 15 minutes to get back to what they were working on after being interrupted by a phone call, e-mail, or IM. Dr. Renaud agrees. "The problem is that when you go back to what you were doing, you've lost your chain of thought and, of course, you are less productive," she said. "People's brains get tired from breaking off from something every few minutes to check emails. The more distracted you are by distractions, including email, then you are going to be more tired and less productive."

E-mail stress slowing down workers, say researchers

Zimbra Desktop Progress Continues

Zimbra continues to evolve and mature, making it one of the more interesting alternative options to traditional collaboration platform vendors.

Over the last several months using Zimbra Desktop, I’ve become very dependent on having my Zimbra email available offline, and now we're happy to announce in the latest version Zimbra calendar is available offline too.

For those less familiar with Zimbra Desktop, it’s among the next generation of messaging clients- you get all the benefits of a rich AJAX email application in the browser (fast search, mash-ups, client-like UI, etc) offline and none of the downside associated with traditional clients (platform dependence, stagnant innovation, storage woes). Since its inception, Zimbra Desktop has been a big hit.

Starting today you can download the lasted version here for Linux, Mac, and Windows desktops (existing Desktop users note you must re-sync).
Zimbra Desktop 0.5

e-Mail: Will It Suddenly Disappear Or Simply "Age-Out"

I'm at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference listening to a panel that includes representatives from Adobe, IBM, Mark Logic and Microsoft. One of the questions was about "what goes away" as we add more tools and newer technologies (e.g., social software). I thought someone would talk about the demise of e-mail but not surprisingly neither IBM or Microsoft pushed the issue that one of their key revenue generators would go the way of the fax machine...

With all the recent conversations in the media about e-mail, I think the proper way to look at e-mail is that it will not go away or die anytime soon but it will "age out" as demographics within the workplace change and people become generally more comfortable with other communication and collaboration models.

I think that as people socialize, share information and collaboration in "spaces" (Facebook, SharePoint, Domino, etc) and also have more real-time / near-time communication tools (e.g., instant messaging, VoIP, XML feeds), the reliance on e-mail as the killer Collaboration 1.0 tool will incrementally diminish over time (I'm talking years and years).

Could there be an e-Mail 2.0? Sure - unfortunately I don't believe that either IBM or Microsoft will significantly restructure their respective products in a transformational manner. But we are seeing some interesting combination of e-mail with XML syndication to insert a level of abstraction between sender and receiver.

Microsoft's Live Hotmail-Outlook Connector

Given the partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo! regarding instant messaging and presence interoperability, I wonder if we will see a an e-mail connector between Yahoo! and Outlook. Probably not - but it would be a valuable gesture.

Microsoft announced in early May that it would make available within a few weeks a beta of a connector for Outlook 2003/2007 users who want to manage their Windows Live Hotmail accounts from inside Outlook.

The beta of that connector, as of this week, is now available for download from the Microsoft Downloads site.

(The same beta connector also can be used by Outlook users to manage their Office Live Mail accounts.)

» Microsoft’s Live Hotmail-Outlook Connector beta ready for download | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

alarm:clock: Seriosity - Maker Of Corporate Email Game

I wonder if I can buy a cup of coffee with my Serios. Intriguing concept: 

..... With Attent, employees assign one another a virtual currency called Serios. More valuable email will gain more Serios and will most likely be read. Using Attent, office workers would receive weekly allowances of Serios, about 100 Serios. That number would be the same for everyone, no matter who they are. But the idea is that managers and higher-level executives would accumulate more of the currency because they receive more messages. That means, in turn, that they have more Serios to spend on responses.

.....

 

Read - Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video Game (NY Times)

Source: alarm:clock: Seriosity - Maker Of Corporate Email Game - Hunting For 2nd Round

alarm:clock: Khosla Invests In Email Analytics Firm Xobni

It will be interesting to see if enterprise decision makers see this as something they will acquire from independent vendors or whether they expect this type of functionality to be delivered by their e-mail provider... analytics like this could feed into Microsoft software such as Knowledge Network as well as other social networking tools. The Xobni site is here.

Pre-launch Xobni promises an Outlook plugin that tracks email analytics so that power-users can more easily can or specific contacts, threads, or emails by times of day. Xobni says they will help you understand:
+ How do you use email?
+ How much time do you spend reading and writing emails?
+ How quickly do you respond to emails?
+ What time of the day is best for contacting busy people?
+ What time of the day do you receive your most important email?
+ How much time do you spend reading mailing lists?

Source: alarm:clock: Khosla Invests In Email Analytics Firm Xobni