* Parlano MindAlign has best of two worlds
One of the most important and useful attributes of e-mail is the ability for a message to retain a thread of conversation – my original message to you is preserved in your reply to my reply to your reply, and so on.
For those of us who use e-mail as a sort of informal database of past communications, that’s an extremely useful feature, since it allows messages to be preserved in the context in which they were originally sent.
What e-mail lacks, however, is an inherent presence capability – the ability for one user to know in real time when another user is available. Common presence tools, such as instant messaging, provide that real-time capability, but they lack the “persistence” of e-mail.
The marriage of persistence with presence could be extremely useful, because it would provide the best of both worlds: the ability to interact with others in real time when they are available, plus the ability to interact with their ideas in their original context when they are not available.
One of the products that provide both capabilities is Parlano MindAlign, a sort of instant messaging/e-mail/knowledge management hybrid.
MindAlign allows the creation of “channels,” a concept much like subject-specific chat rooms. A user can set up a channel to discuss a specific project, for example, and can interact with others in real time using traditional instant messaging capabilities. However, a channel will also store past discussions, so that the information within them can be reviewed at a later date, whether the original author is available or not. MindAlign provides other capabilities, including the ability to set up filters so that only information of interest appears within a channel.
The value of a tool like MindAlign is that it brings together the concepts of e-mail and instant messaging into a single tool that provides what neither tool generally can provide on its own – the persistence of information in its original context with real-time access to its authors.
In short, persistence allows your knowledge to be present even when you’re not. It also raises the larger question of the future of e-mail and IM functionality – will these tools be separate as they are today, or will the future messaging server and client integrate the two, melding them into a single infrastructure? Please let me know your thoughts on the advantages or disadvantages of such an approach at mailto:michael@ostermanresearch.com
