The long road for unified communications
07/03/08
Gnostic Concepts, one of the leading market research and consulting firms of its time, merged its communications and computer practices in 1984 in advance of what it perceived to be the joining of both fields into a unified communications/messaging paradigm. While that was a wise move in many ways, the only problem is that they were about 20 years too early.

You can, but should you purge everything?
07/01/08
Some still believe that deleting all e-mail and other messaging content is the least risky strategy for their organization, that it reduces risk by eliminating e-mails that might contain damaging content from senior executives, etc. The number of those who believe in a "purge everything" strategy is diminishing rapidly compared to even just a couple of years ago.

Unified communications and security
06/26/08
Unified communications and unified messaging provide a number of advantages for organizations of all sizes: users will be more productive through the consolidation of various communication types; IT departments will become more efficient by integrating management of e-mail, voice, instant messaging and fax into a single system; decision-making will be faster; and companies will save money.

Does an employer have the right to view employee text messages?
06/24/08
Last week, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an employer does not have the right to view employees' text messages without a warrant. The ruling is based primarily on who pays for the storage of the content. For e-mail stored on company's servers, U.S. law is quite clear that employers own the content because they pay for the storage. The Court, however, does not view text messaging in the same way: because employers do not pay for the storage, but instead pay only for the service itself, employers do not have the same legal access to this content.

E-discovery is becoming much more important
06/19/08
E-discovery is simply the extension of the discovery process to information that is stored electronically and includes e-mail, instant messages, word processing files, spreadsheets and other electronic content that may be stored on desktops, laptops, file servers, mainframes, smartphones, employees' home computers or on a variety of other platforms. Unified communications and unified messaging systems that store a variety of different data types, including voicemails and instant messages, further complicate the entire process.

Should you consider tomatoes in your messaging infrastructure decisions?
06/17/08
Let's say you were the final decision maker at McDonald's who decided to stop using tomatoes at the company's roughly 12,800 restaurants in the United States. Your decision would certainly make sense given the fact that (a) you wouldn't want people to be harmed by your food and (b) you don't want to be sued for serving food that makes people sick. Now, how would you get the word out to all of these restaurants' managers and staff in a timely way and ensure that they had received the order to stop serving tomatoes immediately?

The impact of attachments on e-mail systems
06/12/08
Most of us have experienced the problem of trying to receive an e-mail with an attachment that was too large for our mail system to accept, or trying to deliver a large attachment to someone with the same limitations. We recently conducted a survey of corporate e-mail users in order to determine the impact of attachments on e-mail systems.

Authentication and trust
06/10/08
I attended the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance (AOTA) Summit in Seattle last week. The Alliance, spearheaded by Craig Spiezle at Microsoft, is focused on improving trust in the e-mail and e-commerce ecosystems, and in pursuing technologies and best practices focused on fighting the ill effects of online fraud. The event was well attended and provided a great deal of useful information and networking.

Unified messaging and productivity
06/05/08
We have recently completed a major new study of the unified communications and unified messaging markets and will be publishing a report on our findings. One of the issues that we wanted to explore is the perception about the impact of unified messaging on employee productivity, focusing on different types of employees in midsized and large organizations.

Extending the value of mobile communications
06/03/08
A large percentage of users in the workplace employ their mobile phone as their primary telephone. This makes it easier to reach people who might be in a building or elsewhere on campus, but it can have some serious downsides, as well, including high cellular bills and poor QoS (or no service at all) in some parts of a building or campus.

Quantifying the time savings from unified messaging
05/29/08
One of the more important benefits of unified messaging - the integration of e-mail, voice and fax communications in a single mailbox - is the time savings that it affords users. Here's a stab at quantifying just the voicemail-related benefits of unified messaging:

E-mail archiving still a controversial issue in many organizations
05/27/08
Last week, I had the privilege of speaking to and participating on a panel at the MER (Managing Electronic Records) Conference in Chicago. The annual event hosted by Cohasset Associates, now in its 15th year, had about 500 attendees. A number of vendors exhibited at the conference, including IBM, EMC, Iron Mountain, Open Text, Orchestria, Access Sciences and a number of other leading firms in the document and records management space.

Video is an important business tool when used properly
05/22/08
My last newsletter related the insightful comments of a reader who discussed the negative impacts of too much communication technology on decision-making. The reader also had suggestions for restricting the use of video and other communication tools during meetings.

Video and corporate culture
05/20/08
Last week's newsletter on the role of video in a unified communications strategy prompted a very interesting response.

Where does video fit in a unified communications strategy?
05/15/08
The average American watches television more than 4.5 hours each day. A Nielsen study found that 81 million people, or 63% of broadband users, watched broadband video at home or at work as of March 2007. But how often do we use video in the context of workplace communications? More to the point, when was the last time you participated in a videoconference as part of your work?

The path to unified communications
05/13/08
Unified communications represents the goal of many workplace decision makers - the integration of e-mail, telephony, presence, fax, mobile communications, collaboration tools, audio conferencing, Web conferencing and videoconferencing into a coordinated and centrally managed communications system, all of which will be accessible via a single address. I believe that's where most workplace communications is ultimately headed, with the ultimate goal being truly intelligent communications. The only real question is how do you get there?

Records management practices need improvement
05/08/08
Cohasset Associates has published the results of a survey that provides some interesting findings on records management.

IT and global warming
05/06/08
Is global warming caused by us or something else? Those who believe in human-caused global warming (Camp A) point to increasing greenhouse gases, our excessive carbon footprint, use of fossil fuels and the like as evidence to support their position. Those who believe in natural global warming (Camp B) point to the close link between solar activity and temperatures on earth, the growing body of evidence that shows greenhouse gases are actually the result of global warming and not its cause, and the fact that global warming started a few centuries before the Industrial Revolution.

Mailbag: Will keeping old e-mail put you at risk?
05/01/08
One of my newsletters from last week on the wisdom of retaining old e-mail generated some interesting comments. Here's a sampling:

Is Dell's acquisition of MessageOne really controversial?
04/29/08
In August 2005, ChangeWave Research found that 45% of individuals surveyed identified Dell as their vendor of choice for desktop systems - in February 2008, that figure had dropped to 32%. A similar decline has occurred in those identifying Dell as their preferred vendor for laptops. Not good news for one of the leading companies in the PC space.

Will keeping old e-mail put you at risk?
04/24/08
There is a mindset among many that retaining old e-mails will put a company at risk. Many reason that e-mails handed over to an adversary during e-discovery, for example, will contain a "smoking gun" that could result in embarrassment or the loss of a legal judgment.

Bad things keep happening: The current state of messaging and Web security
04/22/08
We have just wrapped up a major study focused on e-mail, Web and instant messaging security among midsized and large organizations in North America. One of the questions we asked respondents was about problems they have had during the past 12 months in messaging and Web environments.

Why the Open Relay Data Base lost its relevance
04/17/08
The Open Relay Data Base (ORDB) was started in 2001 as a means of combating spam. The database did what its name implies - it listed open relays on the Internet that could be used by spammers to send their stuff. However, the ORDB became increasingly less relevant over time as spammers migrated to using other techniques, most notably botnets, and as work on maintaining the ORDB waned. The ORDB was taken offline in December 2006.

Microsoft's unified communications future
04/15/08
I went to INTERACT08, a Microsoft conference focused on unified communications. The event was well-attended and provided some good information on the future direction of Microsoft's unified communications technologies. The sessions were quite frank and provided some useful commentary on where Microsoft is today and where it's headed.

Have you ever gone to work sick?
04/10/08
Most of us have gone to work while sick at some point in our careers, either out of a sense of obligation, an appointment or deadline that couldn't be missed, or just a "tough guy" attitude that motivates us to muddle through no matter what. The technical term for working while sick is "presenteeism," which the Harvard Business Review estimates could cost U.S. employers alone $150 billion annually in lost productivity because of reduced output from those who are ill, the infection of co-workers, etc. Unified communications and mobility could be important tools to combat presenteeism among information workers.

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