An Archive as the Hub of Your Communication System?

By Michael Osterman
in

Today’s communications infrastructure consists largely of a set of independent tools, each with its own independent data store: email, voicemail, instant messaging, social networking, wikis, blog posts, Web conferencing and SMS/text messaging. While useful, this disparate collection of tools creates a number of problems:

  • If you need to find something for something as formal as e-discovery or as simple as finding a contact name, you have to search across multiple data stores to find it.
  • Placing a legal hold on data means doing so on multiple data stores.
  • Correlating different communications streams and looking for content across all of them is difficult and so time consuming that most users won’t attempt it.

However, what would happen if all of your communications—every email, every attachment, every instant messaging conversation, every text message, every Tweet, every Facebook post, every voice message, every online meeting session, etc.—went directly into an archive upon receipt, send or completion?  That would mean that everything you did online would be automatically indexed in real time or near real time and be almost instantly available for later access.  If communications systems were architected like this, it would have two important implications:

  • First, archiving would be baked into the communication infrastructure and wouldn’t be the bolt-on option that many decision makers today consider it to be.  This would make e-discovery, legal holds, data mining and storage management significantly easier than it is today in organizations that have not yet implemented archiving.
  • Second, users would no longer need to have a distinct email client, social networking client, instant messaging client and the like. Instead, they would have a single client or Web portal that would provide a view into the real-time archive of content and extract relevant information. For example, instead of using an email client paradigm to which social networking or presence information is added, the client or portal might be more akin to Facebook or iGoogle, presenting users with any or all of their communication streams.  This would make communication significantly easier, since users could be presented with a list of current communication streams that would show emails, instant messaging conversations or relevant social networking posts in order of receipt, relevance, subject, etc. Users could define how they would want information presented based on their mood, the time of day, with whom they were interacting at that moment, etc.

This approach to communication really wouldn’t require new technology, since everything is in place right now to make it a reality.

I’d appreciate getting your feedback on this idea.

Published August 23, 2010