* What the author thinks messaging will look like in five years
Here’s what I think messaging will look like in five years:
* Unified messaging will become the norm. Today, many users have multiple e-mail addresses, instant messaging (IM) handles (each of which uses its own presence information), at least one fax number and at least one phone number.
Five years from now, unified communications systems will allow them to have a single point of contact and, using a directory on the back end, senders of any type of communication will be able to contact them based on their predetermined preferences. That means that an electronic communication will arrive as an e-mail, an IM, a phone call or even a fax based on where the recipient is, what time of day it is, the urgency of the message, its content, etc. All the sender will have to do is send the message and let the unified communication system take care of the rest.
* We will see much greater penetration of browser-based messaging capabilities. The major messaging vendors have been offering these capabilities for many years, the most widely used of which has been Microsoft Outlook Web Access.
However, a number of newer entrants are providing very sophisticated capabilities using browser-based messaging “clients” and offline capabilities, narrowing the gap between feature-rich messaging clients and their browser-based counterparts.
* Web services will become the norm. There are a wide variety of Web-based capabilities that can and should be provided in the context of messaging systems using presence and a variety of other data sources.
We’re seeing some good examples of these capabilities from companies like Zimbra and BlueTie, to mention just a couple of the many that are providing these capabilities, but we will see dramatically more integration of the Web and messaging during the next few years.
These are just a few of the many developments in messaging that I think we’ll see. I’d like to get your thoughts on where you’d like to see messaging go during the next few years, whether you’re a user of messaging or a manager of it. Please drop me a line at michael@ostermanresearch.com.
