Unified Communications

Some Thoughts on Lotusphere and the New Communications Paradigm

Michael Osterman — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:39:53 +0000

There is lots of talk about email going away: some are swearing completely off of email, others complain about how many messages they receive in their inbox, others use only email. Our own research shows that for many corporate workers, the importance of email continues to grow. Add to all of this the continuing discussions about migrating from GroupWise to “Outlook” (the subject of an upcoming blog post), how Notes/Domino is losing share to Exchange, etc.

However, does it really matter? The fundamental goal of email when it was invented decades ago was to enable people to communicate in a more efficient way. That goal has never changed, but the tools that are available to corporate decision makers to enable that efficiency have. For example, we now have social tools that can enable communication in a way that enables easier access to and analysis of employee and customer sentiment. We have collaboration tools that make it easier for groups to work on a document instead of sending a file to everyone via email. We have text messaging and instant messaging that enable bursty types of communication that are more efficient than email.

Spending time at Lotusphere last week reinforced my view that IBM, more than many other vendors, really understands the new paradigm. To them it’s not so much about Notes/Domino losing share to Exchange (which, on a worldwide basis, is questionable anyway given that there are more Domino servers under management than at any time in the company’s history) or cloud vs. on-premise or social media vs. email. Instead, it’s about how communications is evolving into a new platform that integrates social into the business fabric—integrating new paradigms with the old where it makes sense to do so. It’s about a shift in corporate culture that doesn’t focus on siloes of information, but instead uses a variety of communication modes in a way that makes the most sense. For example, email need not—and should not—succumb to social media, but instead evolve into a tool that enables integration of various communication types that makes sense given a particular organization’s culture, regulatory environment, today’s customer base, future customer base, the geographic distribution of its employees and other factors.

The bottom line is that email—and every other mode of electronic communication—is about how to let employees and customers communicate, collaborate, learn, change and act in a way that meets their needs and those of their employer. Those who get caught up in the email vs. social media vs. Web 2.0 vs. cloud vs. on-premise vs. whatever else discussion are often missing the bigger picture: this is much more about business and getting things done efficiently, and not so much about technology.

Actually, Many Care About GroupWise

Michael Osterman — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:11:54 +0000

David Strom wrote an interesting piece about the just-released GroupWise 2012 entitled No Once Cares That Novell Has A New Version of GroupWise. His assertion is that GroupWise is yesterday’s news, has been supplanted by other platforms, and is simply a dying animal.

Although Mr. Strom is a very sharp guy, I respectfully disagree:

I’m certain that the vast majority of the 10,000 organizations cited in Mr. Strom’s article care about the new release.
Same goes for the 47 state governments he cited that use GroupWise.
Ditto for the many third-party developers of encryption, archiving, security and other products that are designed for use in GroupWise environments.
Even competitors will care, since some have made public—and not so public—their strong desire to move GroupWise-enabled organizations to their respective platforms.

Mr. Strom is right in that GroupWise has lost a significant portion of its customer base and the development of the platform has not kept pace with that of some competing solutions. However, the new GroupWise has some noteworthy and interesting features as he pointed out, such as integration with Skype for presence detection and an iPad client among them, that will help to keep interest in GroupWise alive. Moreover, given that migrating to a new messaging system is typically arduous and expensive, a new version with interesting new features might be enough to convince some decision makers that they can at least postpone the migration, if not put it off completely.

Does this mean that the new version of GroupWise will cause the platform suddenly to reverse its slide and start picking up new customers in droves? Doubtful, but if this is the first in several steps focused on updating and improving GroupWise, predictions about the death of GroupWise may have been premature.

Some Thoughts on Short Attention Spans

Michael Osterman — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 22:37:27 +0000

In yesterday’s mail I received two unusual pieces of correspondence: The first, a handwritten note from a collaboration expert—and a very nice man—that does some industry analysis for us as part of our annual information service; and the second, a letter inviting me to attend some 15-minute Webinars. Both were unusual in that they were written on paper and sent through the mail, not electronically.

That got me to thinking about how our communications has changed from mailed correspondence to fax to email to SMS and other very short modes of communication. While the speed of delivery is certainly improving over time, I believe the primary driver for migrating to faster and shorter modes of communication is television. For example, studies have shown that an increase in television viewing among children shortens their attention span, which I believe translates into other realms, as well. For example, the average sound bite in the 1968 presidential election was 43 seconds, but dropped to 9.8 seconds in the 1988 election and 7.3 seconds by 2000. Moreover, television changes our mindset into believing that every problem on a funny TV show can be solved in 30 minutes, while problems on serious shows require a full 60 minutes (minus 16 minutes of commercials) to resolve.

If our attention spans continue to get shorter, what impact will this have on our ability to communicate meaningfully in the future? Can you say enough about your product in 10 seconds to get people interested in what you’re selling? Can your 140-character Tweet or 160-character text message really convey your actual meaning? More important, can you as a business decision maker or voter or parent or consumer gather enough information in just a few seconds to make a well-informed and meaningful decision?

I’m not sure what the solution might be and welcome your thoughts on the topic, particularly in the context of business communications and how we will convey information in the future. I think it’s an important topic to discuss.

IDC Offers Insights into SMBs, Unified Communication and Collaboration

Stephanie Jordan — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 02:16:33 +0000

Just because a business is small to medium-sized does not mean that the importance of messaging tools is lost to them. According to recent research released last week from International Data Corporation (IDC), forward-looking SMBs are selectively using a range of tools including voice-over-IP (VoIP) and unified messaging. Few, however, says IDC have implemented a comprehensive, end-to-end unified communications (UC) system that can deliver connectivity and collaboration capabilities beyond the sum of its separate parts.

“Many SMB’s business and IT priorities relate to communication and collaboration,” says Justin Jaffe, research manager for Small/Medium-Sized Business and Remote Worker/Home Business research at IDC. “SMBs are interested in both underlying capabilities and specific UC technologies.”

The report authors note that due to the economic downturn underscoring the need for expense management and restrictions on business travel, especially for SMBs, there has been an increase in the popularity of virtual alternatives to in-person meetings. Approximately 45% of medium-sized businesses currently use some type of conferencing technology.

Additionally, the paper states that while SMB ownership of mobile resources—from smartphones to notebooks to media tablets—continues to increase along with interest in supporting remote workers, adoption of unified messaging remains modest. The study found, however, that the percentage of firms citing plans to add it in the next 12 months has increased since the previous IDC survey, indicating a keen interest with more than 30% of small firms and 55% of midsize firms acknowledging plans to add at least one UC component in the next 12 months.

“The real challenge for vendors is to effectively connect the benefits of unified communications to improved business performance,” believes Jaffe. “Show how UC can make a real difference in productivity and efficiency and SMBs will flock to it.”

More information and results can be found in the IDC whitepaper: Unified Communications in U.S. Small and Medium-Sized Business, 2011: Growing Demand for Communication, Collaboration, and Connectivity—But Integration Remains Elusive (IDC #230314).

In Search of a More Intelligent Messaging System

Michael Osterman — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 21:47:28 +0000

I had a good discussion with @Andrew_Barnes last week about the evolution of email and messaging in general. We discussed a column I had written a few years ago about a truly intelligent messaging system, which I have rewritten and updated here with some additional thoughts on where I would like to see messaging go.

Today, most of us can be contacted, or have files or information sent to us, using any number of addresses or contact numbers. In my own case, I have a corporate email address; a calendar; multiple personal email addresses; a fax number; a corporate telephone number; a personal telephone number; a mobile number; accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+; a corporate postal address; a personal postal address; several instant messaging handles; a Dropbox address; a YouSendIt account; an account for the online document repository for our annual service subscribers; as well as various other accounts. For the most part, these services are separate and do not share information, nor is there any sort of policy applied to how, when and why they are used.

Now, imagine that I had only a single point of contact, such as my email address, and a management/policy engine that managed my interactions with people, data, calendars, physical addresses, etc. For example:

I could establish a policy that traditional email communications would go to my email inbox and be tagged appropriately: urgent, normal, business, personal, etc. Urgent emails could be turned into a text message or a voice call to my corporate, personal or mobile phone based on time of day or where my calendar said I should be. Invitations could be turned into calendar entries to await my approval, but invitations for appointments within the next 12 hours would be sent to me as a text message or instant message.
Any files that were sent to me would automatically go to the appropriate online document repository and I would receive a notification based on their urgency and content: an email for non-urgent communications, a text message for urgent content, etc. Moreover, all content would be scanned and archived appropriately.
Voice calls would be sent to the appropriate device (corporate desk phone, personal phone, mobile phone) based on the sender, urgency of the content, the time of day or my location.
The management engine would know my calendar, location and transit status (moving or stationary) and would notify me appropriately: my mobile would never ring with an urgent message while I was in a meeting, while driving or when I was in a theatre unless it was from my wife or daughter, for example.
Social media content would be scanned for information that was relevant to me and I would be notified appropriately based on the timeliness of the information, the author, the subject, etc. For example, a Twitter post extolling the virtues of the Eggs Benedict at the Four Seasons in London would simply post to my Twitter account, but the post ‘Apple and Microsoft to merge’ would be sent as a text message to my mobile.
Text messages sent to my mobile could be received as text messages if they were urgent or received only as emails if they were merely informational.
Faxes could be sent to me as an email based on their content, or relevant information from the fax could be culled and sent as a text message if it was urgent.
The system would attempt to contact me about urgent issues until I had responded in some way.
In addition, and in rare cases, I could designate that some types of attachments be printed automatically and mailed via postal services.

Such a system would benefit recipients because the right information would be received on the right device in a coordinated fashion, and all communication could be received via a single interface. A system like this would also benefit the sender, since he or she could send any content to a single address with a greater assurance that the information would be received on the right device, at the right time and with the appropriate level of urgency.

Some of the capabilities I’ve described above exist today—and the technology to manage all of this certainly does—but we have a long way to go in terms of building truly cohesive messaging systems that will enable this type of seamless communication.

Fonality Uses Cloud to Deliver One Billion Contact Center Phone Calls

Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale — Fri, 06 May 2011 04:44:17 +0000

Fonality recently announced its one billionth contact center phone call. This milestone reflects more than 4,800 deployments as the adoption of Fonality’s cloud-based contact center solutions continue to change how fast-growing businesses deliver exceptional customer support. Deployed across a variety of industries, Fonality’s cloud-based model provides businesses from ten to 250 agents with the same full-featured services of traditional on-premise IP systems without costly hardware, infrastructure or lengthy implementation cycles.

By leveraging VoIP and Unified Communications (UC) capabilities, Fonality enables contact centers of any size to benefit from Fortune 500 features at a cost of ownership up to 60 percent less than legacy providers. Delivered through Fonality Heads Up Display (HUD), a UC dashboard with features such as real-time contact center metrics, drag and drop call management, presence, email integration, secure chat and visual voicemail, the solution is easy to use, simple to manage and affordable to deploy. “More and more growing businesses are recognizing that their entire organization can benefit from contact center features, such as skills-based routing, to improve productivity and strengthen customer loyalty,” said Fonality’s Chief Technology Officer, Rick Bushell. “Regardless of the size or scope of a contact center, with Fonality, employees can be more effective and productive without the high costs typically associated with these capabilities.”

Fonality HUD provides a color-coded status of all customer service or sales team activities, including current and pending calls. Managers are empowered with 360-degree views of all communications within the contact center leveraging features such as permission-based call monitoring of both in office and remote agents, as well as providing comprehensive performance metrics. With “drag and drop” capabilities, calls can be shared with colleagues in whisper or barge mode, in addition to features such as audio conferencing, secure chat, photo caller ID, visual voicemail, email/text, ring-back and on-the-fly call recording. Fonality HUD can also be seamlessly integrated with business applications like SalesForce, NetSuite, Vanilla Soft or SugarCRM to provide real-time customer information.

Crusecom, a Michigan-based provider of contact center services for IT support to state agencies and businesses replaced a well-known, premise-based legacy IP communications provider with Fonality. By switching to a hosted cloud model, the company has lowered maintenance and support costs by approximately $250,000 annually.“

Fonality truly understands the needs of today’s contact centers, especially in terms of controlling costs,” said Arthur Cruse, CEO of Crusecom. “Beyond preserving budget and improving call quality, we have also enjoyed increased productivity. Fonality HUD quickly and efficiently allows our subject matter experts and supervisors to join calls to better meet the needs of our customers. Plus, the system grows as our needs do without lengthy and costly implementations, which was a major concern with our previous provider.”

The solution’s hosted model can also create a virtual call center environment with seamless connectivity for workers across locations. Virginia-based Exec-u-sist, provides remote administrative and contact center support to residential service providers, realtors, home-based businesses, marketing firms and technology companies. By using Fonality’s cloud-based contact center solutions, the company can create the traditional call center experience without compromising performance or committing to expensive infrastructure and time-consuming integration.

“Fonality’s solutions are an ideal match for the way we operate,” said Tiffany Nielsen, CEO of Exec-u-sist “Fonality HUD allows us to redefine the conventional contact center by keeping our team connected with improved call clarity and functionality as if they were at the same location. Without Fonality, we couldn’t support our business model and would not have realized thousands of dollars in savings.”

Patton's SmartNode Products Certified Interoperable with Lotus Sametime

Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 22:07:56 +0000

Patton is a multi-national organization that designs, develops, and manufactures electronic communications equipment for network access, connectivity, VoIP, triple-play and video surveillance that is making consistently big waves in the Unified Communications (UC) space. At ITExpo in February, they announced, in alliance with the Elastix project – an open source UC distribution project – that they had released a mutually certified UC solution.

Now, Patton (USA) and Patton-Inalp (Switzerland) have announced that IBM has tested and certified the company’s SmartNode VoIP gateways, VoIP routers and IADs for interoperability with the Lotus Sametime unified communications (UC) platform.Why is this important? With SmartNode VoIP routers, Patton says large enterprises can control capital expenses while implementing UC by integrating existing public branch exchange phone systems and PSTN connections into IBM’s Lotus Sametime platform.

Sametime was designed to remove the seams between email, voicemail, instant messaging, wired and wireless phones while providing presence status, Company officials said that this enables workers to avoid such time wasters as looking up contact information and calling people who aren’t available. Moreover, SmartNode gateways offer immediate access to the world of UC for organizations using traditional analog or digital phone systems. Working together, the companies could feasibly create an even better connected world.

Their specs boast impressive any-service-any-port (ASAP) capabilities that can deliver any WAN service on every industry-standard telephony interface that is currently in use. Built to be highly scalable (SMBs all the way to enterprise-sized organizations), SmartNode scales from 2 to 120 concurrent VoIP or fax calls, and supports SIP, H.323, ISDN, and POTS telephony plus T.38 and SuperG3 FAX over TDM/PSTN and IP/Ethernet services simultaneously.

Company officials said that most IBM-certified VoIP equipment is less scalable in terms of interface types, port counts, and number of concurrent calls. SmartNode enriches IBM’s Sametime solution with advanced telephony features. Therefore, it upgrades a legacy solution in all the right ways.

These features include integration of PSTN trunks and legacy PBX systems into Sametime/Telephony Control Server (TCS); VoIP and data survivability via PSTN access/breakout/fallback and IP link redundancy; PBX backup against IP trunk failure to the IBM TCS; secure VPNs with IPsec-encrypted voice.

Additional features include any-to-any least-cost call routing and dial-map planning; routed Internet Access with QoS for toll quality voice; traffic management with voice prioritization; and more.

HP Sets Strategy to Lead Connected World

Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 00:24:48 +0000

HP has a vision. It’s aiming to provide seamless, secure, context-aware experiences for the connected world. The company feels that the convergence of cloud computing and connectivity is fundamentally changing how IT is delivered and how information is consumed. Stating that powerful trends like consumerization, cloud computing and connectivity are redefining the way people live, businesses operate and the world works, HP sees that traditional on-premise, proprietary computing resources are gradually being complemented and even replaced by the massive, agile and open computing resources of the cloud. Meanwhile, the cloud is combining with mobility to create ubiquitous connectivity and they intend to lead that emerging market.

In HP’s view, a hybrid environment that combines the best of traditional environments with private and public clouds will be the prevailing model for many large enterprises. HP CEO Leo Apotheker is committed to continue enhancing HP’s offerings across its broad hardware, software and services portfolio to meet evolving customer demands while also leveraging its core strengths to develop the cloud- and connectivity-based solutions. Apotheker has his sights set on HP becoming the leading provider of cloud-based platform services.

“We see clearly a world in which the impact of cloud and connectivity is changing not only the user experience, but how individuals, small businesses and enterprises will consume, deploy and leverage information technology. HP is well positioned to be the trusted leader in addressing this opportunity,” said Apotheker. “HP’s scalable, converged infrastructure forms the backbone of today’s cloud computing, and we expect our leadership in software, services, PCs and web-connected printers, as well as the strengths we’ve built and the investments we’ve made, to give us a huge advantage as we help define, deliver and run the truly connected world that spans cloud and connectivity, from the consumer through the enterprise.”

Apotheker outlined a four-point strategy for HP’s expanded market leadership by extending its leadership in managing and optimizing today’s traditional environments; leveraging HP’s core strength in cloud to build and manage next-generation cloud-based architectures; being the trusted partner to customers by enabling the seamless transition to hybrid computing models; and by defining and delivering the connected world from the consumer to the enterprise.

In his presentation, Apotheker examined the impact of industry trends on users and businesses, and how those trends can best be met through HP’s portfolio, core businesses and scale. Of note in the speech:

HP announced it intends to leverage its position as a leading provider of cloud technology to develop a portfolio of cloud services from infrastructure to platform services. HP also signaled it plans to develop and run the industry’s first open cloud marketplace that will combine a secure, scalable and trusted consumer app store and an enterprise application and services catalog.
HP intends to build webOS into a leading connectivity platform. As the world’s No. 1 maker of PCs and printers, HP has the potential to deliver 100 million webOS-enabled devices a year into the marketplace, and HP plans to use that scale along with leading development tools to build a robust developer community that is eager to access every segment of the market and every corner of the globe.

“The world has changed dramatically, and we increasingly live in a world where enterprise and personal IT experiences are blurring,” said Crawford Del Prete, chief research officer, IDC. “More and more, it’s about enabling customers to seamlessly and securely interact with the ‘right’ information for a multitude of contexts. The technology and delivery models required to enable this change are significant. HP’s strategy lays a foundation for the company to move from delivering world-class information technology, to world-class information experiences.”

Strategic priorities

HP’s strategy will be driven across a multitude of initiatives, focused on three strategic areas:

Cloud: HP plans to build a full cloud stack and help transition customers to hybrid cloud environments. Apotheker also unveiled the company’s plans to build an open applications marketplace that integrates consumer, enterprise and developer services. The platform will support multiple languages and will be open to third parties. HP will vet applications for security and interoperability to facilitate an environment that is both trusted and open. A device-aware HP cloud will configure and send the appropriate services to the device that the customer is using, and connected devices will intuitively access services the customer needs.
Connectivity: HP has a globally distributed installed base in both the consumer and enterprise markets. This large, growing, installed base of devices provides the company with the opportunity to build HP-, customer- and ecosystem-driven innovation.
Software: Through a build, buy, and partner approach, HP intends to continue to enhance its management and security portfolio. The company plans to address real-time analytics for “Big Data,” which is the combination of structured and the much faster growing unstructured data set. The company believes that once their acquisition of Vertica is finalized, it will provide an important asset in this area.

“Information technology is the fabric of the global community. Data is the world’s most valuable raw material and information is the most valuable commodity—created, consumed and delivered in always-on connectivity,” says Apotheker, “At HP, our mission is to deliver seamless, secure, context-aware experiences for a connected world.”

Avaya Dev and Tech Partner Program Helps Improve Collaboration for SMEs Across Industries

Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 02:12:00 +0000

Avaya, maker of business collaboration systems, software and services, today announced an array of application development partners working to drive new and innovative capabilities for Avaya IP Office, the company’s flagship communications solution for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). These partners are part of Avaya’s new DevConnect program, an initiative to promote the creation of a new generation of solutions complementary to unified communications (UC) by integrating products, services and technologies with Avaya solutions.

Avaya DevConnect provides a wide range of developer-oriented resources, including access to application program interfaces, developer tools, and technical support. The company says its membership has grown by over 16 percent in the last year and that there are over 1,400 Avaya compliance tested solutions, with 30 to 40 new solutions being added each month. For the small business arena, there are more than 300 tested solutions from DevConnect members across all Avaya SME communications platforms.

Many Avaya DevConnect partners develop solutions for the SME market, in an effort to help those businesses using Avaya IP Office and Business Communications Manager compete at the same level as large enterprises. These partners develop capabilities tested for interoperability with Avaya SME products, and also help enhance them. Applications that have recently been introduced for Avaya IP Office from partners include:

Presence Tailored to the Small Business: AdvaTel has developed InTouch, a second generation UC application that brings together internal presence and federated presence to all of one’s external contacts via Yahoo!, Skype, MSN Lync and Outlook calendar. The solution, which does not require a server, lets users move between voice telephony, instant messaging (IM), SMS and email with just one click.
Hospitality Applications Enhance Guest Service for Hotels: The DuVoice DV2000 is a messaging system and Property Management System (PMS) interface for Avaya IP Office that is suited for hotels. DV2000 capabilities include everything from voicemail and wake-up call management to enabling employees to handle mini-bar inventories via phone. DuVoice also provides 911 features for Avaya IP Office that alert the front desk when emergency calls are made and pinpoint the location of the room requiring help.
Resource Software International Ltd. (RSI) provides call accounting software—Shadow CMS Enterprise—which performs telecom billing functions and interfaces with a hotel’s Property Management System (PMS). The company interoperates with Avaya IP Office, providing a fully-scalable UC management solution that lets administrators forecast, monitor and allocate communications management expenses. Hotel-centric features include the ability for cleaning staff to enter the status of a room’s condition using a phone, wake up calls, emergency notification and features for deploying messages, menus or advertisements to phone sets.
SIP Capabilities Bring New Value to SMEs: Optimum Voice SIP Trunking from Cablevision’s Optimum Business was designed to deliver high-quality, reliable voice service to SMBs through a converged voice and data network that can scale as needed for up to 100 employees. This capability lets businesses use all of Avaya IP Office’s state-of-the-art features, while it improves the quality and reliability of voice services, simplifies configuration, reduces equipment costs, and provides significant room for scalability at about half the cost of traditional T1 solutions.
Automated Applications Simplify Processes: Computer Instruments offers e-IVR, which contains the components that allow companies, schools, churches and others to reach out to constituents automatically to remind them of appointments, inform them of school cancellations, and alert them of emergencies. These messages may be sent via phone, email or text by seamlessly integrating with Avaya IP Office. Inbound functions allow callers to find out about homework that is due, renew a prescription, or pay their utility bill—via speech recognition or phone prompts.
The combination of Computer Instruments’ e-IVR vertical team and Avaya IP Office helps many organizations simplify how people get information out. The company enhances Avaya IP Office with self-service applications for weather alerts, hospital lab results, or last minute searches for substitute teachers. In education, an absentee application lets teachers use a phone to mark students present, and if someone is absent, a message goes to parents via email, phone or text message.

Inbox Love – A New Conference on Email

Ben Gross — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 21:59:01 +0000

Inbox Love, a new conference on email, will be held on February 25th at the Microsoft Conference Center in Mountain View, California. The speakers and sessions look great. 500 Startups’ (Dave McClure) is producing the conference along with OtherInbox (Joshua Baer) and AwayFind (Jared Goralnick).

I attended and spoke at the pre-event meeting for Inbox Love in December. The attendees and speakers were excellent and it looks like the main event will be even better. I wrote about it in Inbox Love and Recent Innovation in Email.

If you had asked me a few years ago if I thought that in 2011 there would be a new email conference and a whole host of fantastic new email products and services, I would have said no. I’m happy to say that I would have been wrong. Registration for Inbox Love is now open.

Sessions at Inbox Love include:

The Implicit Social Graph
Inbox Infatuation: Will They Still Love Your Product in the Morning?
The Psychology of Behavioral Change: Proven results from 1 million+ emails that delight, engage, and influence users
WHEW! This Email Smells Bad…Has It Expired?
If They Mated: Email, Voice, SMS & The Next Generation of Communication
The Love Connection: Platforms & The Future of Consumer Email
The Love Connection: Platforms & The Future of Business Email
The Integration of Email & Social
Privacy vs. Personality: What’s in an Email Address?
NextGen Email Apps

The list of Speakers at Inbox Love includes:

Joshua Baer - Founder & CEO, OtherInbox
Victoria Bellotti - Principal Scientist & Manager at PARC
Bill Boebel - VP of Strategy, Rackspace
Jeff Bonforte - CEO, Xobni
Manlio Carrelli - CMO, Intermedia
Amy Ellis - Head of Integrations & Partnerships, MailChimp
Miriam Geller - Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Mail
Jared Goralnick - Founder & CEO, AwayFind.com
Auren Hoffman - CEO of Rapleaf
Fletcher Jones - Product Lead, AOL Mail
Pierre Khawand - Founder, People-OnTheGo
Jeff Lawson - Co-Founder & CEO, Twilio
Dan Martell - Co-founder, Flowtown
Dave McClure - Founding Partner, 500 Startups
Paul McDonald - Product Lead, Gmail
Scott McMullan - Google Apps Partner Lead for Google Enterprise
Josh Merchant - Co-Founder & CTO, Lymbix, Inc.
Alex Moore - CEO, Baydin
John Robb - Senior Director — Zimbra products & marketing, VMware
Isaac Saldana - Co-founder & CEO, SendGrid
Tom Sather - Email Deliverability Consultant, Return Path
Mark Schmulen - General Manager, Social Media, Constant Contact, Inc.
Ramit Sethi - Author, “I Will Teach You To Be Rich”
Jonathan B. Spira - CEO & Chief Analyst, Basex
Rahul Vohra - Co-founder & CEO, Rapportive

An Email Wish List

Michael Osterman — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 01:17:05 +0000

As are many tens of millions of others, I am an avid user of email—so much so that my productivity typically declines when I am without email because of a service outage or some other problem, even if that problem lasts only a few minutes. As one who is reliant on email, I have developed a wish list of things I’d like to see in email. I realize that some of these are already available with various tools, but my choices are a bit more limited given that I’m using a Mac, and not all of these capabilities are available anyway.

Here goes:

I would like to have a browser experience that works equally well across all leading browsers as it does when using the desktop client. For example, Outlook Web Access does a great job at mimicking the desktop Outlook experience, but only in Internet Explorer. That said, there are many email systems that provide a very similar experience in both the browser and the desktop client.
I’d also like to be able to send an email with an attachment to a group of people, but then select which ones get the attachment. For example, if I send a document to A, there I times I want B, C and D to know that A was sent the attachment, although only A really needs to have a copy of it in his mailbox.
It would be very useful to be able to have the calendar populate an email response. For example, quite often someone will ask about my availability over the next week. If they’re not sharing my calendar, I would like to be able to press a hotkey and have a list of my available times dropped into my response so that I don’t have to build this list manually.
I’m a fan of really big mailboxes—not so much a fan of big mailboxes that crash email clients. Enough said.
I’d also like to have built-in analytics for email (perhaps as a cloud-based offering) that would recommend the best time of day to send emails to specific individuals and then schedule those emails automatically. Similarly, analytics could be used for a wide range of other tasks, such as reviewing the content of inbound and outbound emails to gauge the tone of the language used, or reviewing the content of attachments and then automatically filing them into folders without requiring pre-established rules.
Finally, I would like to have built-in text messaging in my email client so that I could integrate mobile and email a bit more than I do now.

What’s your wish list?

The False Positive Problem and the Impact on Your Business

Michael Osterman — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 08:43:55 +0000

False positives—valid emails that are mistakenly identified as spam—can be an inconsequential problem or a very serious one, depending on how you view the issue. For example, a false positive rate of 0.15%, or one false positive in every 667 emails received, seems quite low. This means that a user who receives about 100 emails per day will experience a false positive only about once a week, or roughly 50 false positives every year. Not really all that serious—at least at first glance.

Now, consider that an organization of 1,000 users will experience roughly 50,000 false positives every year at a rate of 0.15%. Further, conservatively assume that perhaps only 1% of those false positives represent a very important communication that is mistakenly identified as spam—an inquiry from a prospective client, a complaint from a key customer, or a notification about a venue change for an important meeting. That means that an “inconsequential” false positive rate of 0.15% turns translates into 500 or so very important emails that your organization could easily miss. That doesn’t count the missed newsletters or other communications that are not really spam, but get labeled as such.

In a white paper that we will be publishing shortly with BoxSentry, we have calculated that the cost of false positives is nearly $700 per user per year in large organizations. Here’s why:

As noted above, false positives result in important emails being trapped in a spam quarantine. For example, in recent tweets posted at WheresMyMail.org, users complain about their airline tickets, PayPal receipts and emails copied to themselves all being identified as spam.
Users spend significant amounts of time every year going through their spam quarantine looking for false positives. If a user spends only two minutes per day doing so, that would still represent more than one workday every year spent on just looking through the quarantine.
Because many systems in a supply chain rely on email as the underlying transport mechanism either for automatic or ad hoc communications to inform suppliers of changes to delivery schedules, confirmation of orders, and the like, communications not received in a timely manner can have serious ramifications on production, ordering and other supply-chain activities.
There are other serious consequences from false positives that are more difficult to quantify, often because they do not occur on a regular basis—the client who is upset because her important inquiry was never answered, the add-on sale that was never made because the order was not received, or the business record that was never archived because it was lost in the quarantine.

The bottom line message is that false positives are still a serious issue and one that organizations of all sizes—but particularly large ones and service providers—should revisit and resolve.

Security Training vs. Technology

Michael Osterman — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 19:51:18 +0000

Clearswift recently reported the results of a security-focused survey it conducted. The good news is that 74% of the office workers it surveyed are “confident” in their understanding of Internet-focused security policies in their company. The bad news is that one-third of respondents have not received any IT security training since they were hired by their employer, and most without training in the recent past have been with their employer for more than five years.

What this means is that many employees joined a company before they used Twitter or Facebook, before the Web became the primary vector for malware, and before the Zeus botnet became a widespread problem—and they have never had IT security training on these issues. This then begs the question—why are so many employees confident in their understanding of their employer’s security policies? They probably should not be.

This finding suggests a couple of things:

First, employers need to train their employees on security policies. This means creating detailed and thorough policies about the use of email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, instant messaging, Web surfing, personal Webmail accounts, use of corporate assets at home and everything else that employees might use, download or otherwise introduce into the corporate network. Policies should focus on acceptable use, the types of content that can and cannot be shared, the appropriate venues for sending content, etc. The policies and the training that support them should be updated regularly.
Second, realizing that employees are not perfect and that even with the best training they will still make mistakes, robust technologies should be implemented as a backstop against these mistakes. This includes Web gateways offered by companies like Clearswift and many others, anti-malware technologies, data loss prevention technologies, anti-virus at the desktop, compliance tools on smartphones and a host of other capabilities.

It’s important to note that training and technology are both critical elements in any company’s security infrastructure. You can implement all the training you want, but it won’t guard against employee mistakes. You can implement all the technology you want, but it won’t provide a perfect defense against bad stuff coming in or the sensitive stuff going out. Our own research finds that both training and technology are effective components of a security system, although IT decision makers believe that the latter is the more effective. However, as the Clearswift study suggests, both training and technology are indispensible elements in defending an organization to the greatest extent possible.

Consumer Messaging in Business

Stephanie Jordan — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 11:00:58 +0000

Earlier this year, in its Internet Trends report, Morgan Stanley wrote about two rapidly emerging commerce platforms, social networking and mobile, calling them “game-changing communications.” Game-changing is an excellent descriptor, as the coming together of a number of factors have paved the way for a phenomenon happening throughout businesses, regardless of industry or size, that have had a profound impact on messaging technologies, employees and IT. Even though these products and tools were originally designed for consumers, they are finding their way into the corporate world at a staggering pace.

One of the key reasons is the adoption of these communications for personal use. “We have seen such an adoption of technology in the home,” observes Ian Moyse, channel director for Webroot Software, Inc. “If you think about it, the home has become much more IT literate. It wasn’t so long ago that we didn’t have a PC at home, or if you did it was a really big box and quite expensive. Now people have laptops.” Moyse points to how in the U.K. ISPs have been known to give away cheap laptops with broadband connections. “On the home PC, you have the freedom of choice for anything you install. If you have an iPad or iPhone, of course you need iTunes, so that is installed. Then there is social media: Facebook, Twitter, etc. People are used to using all these things at home and then they come to work and want to use a particular device or application.” Because people are more IT literate than ever before, Moyse believes employees are much more likely to make technology choices without the approval of IT.

Pete Schlampp, vice president of marketing for Solera Networks characterizes this shift as the perfect storm. “First, Apple starts making these really cool products that everyone wants to have” iPhone, Mac laptop, iPads. Then you have this other trend where people are used to Facebook or Gmail, and there is this consumerization of IT, where people are very comfortable with IT. Then you have this massive recession, where companies aren’t spending money on the IT that they want to—whether it’s new computers, new servers, or better security. Finally, you have employees saying: ‘Why can’t I use my Mac or my iPhone?’ And so what has happened, is IT has let their guard down, and don’t have a good answer as to why not.”

This IT literacy is a driving force in the shift, as more and more employees are taking it upon themselves to choose the messaging technologies and tools they want in the workplace. “Almost every customer that I have talked to in the last month or two is dealing with this in some form or fashion,” acknowledges Fred Kost, director of marketing for security and borderless networks at Cisco Systems, Inc. “Users are procuring their own devices. It used to be BlackBerrys, but now we are seeing this huge influx of the popularity of a full-featured hybrid in the consumer’s hand and it is driving this desire to say: ‘Why can’t I get on the network and use this device?’ There are consumers that are pushing it into the IT environment just by numbers, price point and functionality.”

Personal vs. Company Issued

A recent study, The Cisco Connected World Report, which surveyed 2,600 workers and IT professionals in 13 countries, revealed that two of every three employees surveyed (66 percent) expect IT to allow them to use any device—personal or company-issued—to access corporate networks, applications, and information anywhere, at any time, and they expect the types of devices to continue diversifying.

“When a person gets a device, they are going to take it to work,” believes Dr. Nathaniel Borenstein, the co-creator of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) email standard (the standard that still holds today) and chief scientist for Mimecast. “I think there is no getting around it. How openly they do it and how soon they do it is a function of the corporate culture. If you value a device enough to spend your own money for it, you probably are going to find it valuable at work, unless they give you something very similar.”

This trend seems to be taking hold. According to a recent Forrester Research report, almost half of U.S. and European businesses surveyed are embracing the notion of allowing personally owned devices access to a secure corporate network.

“Most of the companies we talk to have a majority of their employees on personally liable or individually liable phones vs. corporate,” confirms Dan Nemo, chief operating officer of TextGuard Inc. “This means they are bringing the phone into the workplace, but it is owned by the employee.” Nemo estimates that it is 60 to 70 percent of the companies he deals with. “Employees are bringing their personal devices to work and saying I want to get this connected and the employer has a choice. They can get better productivity, figuring the employee will work at home, at the doctor’s office, etc, plus the company doesn’t have to buy a big package, instead it can reimburse the employee for a piece. We hear many companies don’t want to take on the administrative hassle and the expense of phone plans. We expect this phenomenon will continue to happen, driven by employees that want the newest devices out there.”

The challenge to IT, as a result, is a host of mobile phone types to deal with. “We have two dynamics going on, one is the consumer wanting to do it, and the other is the IT organization trying to figure out how to support it,” says Kost. “Maybe it is more economical if employees do buy their own devices. So clearly, the device itself is having an impact.”

But can IT manage all the devices equally well? “I don’t think you can, yet,” says Borenstein. “I remember when people wanted to write user interfaces, applications that worked on the PC, Mac and UNIX. What they really wanted was a tool kit that would make them work on all of them with minimal modifications by the programmer, at one point that was an impossible dream. But now we have tool kits that do exactly that. It is likely to happen in the smartphone market, but not when it is evolving as quickly as it is. It can’t happen when it is evolving as quickly as it is! But once a few vendors shake out, and Android stabilizes and it becomes clear what Apple is and isn’t going to change about multi-tasking, and stuff like that, then you can imagine a software layer that produces an interface for the BlackBerry, the iPhone, etc. But I think we have a really difficult period for several years before that.”

With the days of a company supplying an employee with a phone dwindling these past three or four years, companies have benefited financially by avoiding expensive plans and employees get to use the phone of their choosing. “Employees definitely think it is great,” says Schlampp. “But it opens up a lot of security challenges. Certainly one of them is when someone brings in a device onto the network. How do you know where that device has been? How do you know if the person who is using it is the right person? Frankly, the technology to ensure that is not at the same level as if I was to bring my Dell laptop, which can be authenticated. So you have that trend going on, with companies unable to stem the tide and they do not have the resources to be able to say anything about it.”

Perhaps feeding this trend toward personal mobile phone use is the pace of adoption of these impressive mobile devices. In the same Morgan Stanley report, the authors noted that mobile is ramping faster than desktop Internet did and will be bigger than most people expect. The report predicts that more users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years. With mobile growth such as this, it might have been impossible to tell employees that they could not use their personal mobile devices at work anyway. But what of other consumer oriented messaging, like social media?

“Unless the user at work is locked down totally, there comes the dilemma in the particular world we are in, of security,” says Moyse. “The further you lock down a machine you impede the user to a point that they can’t work. So there has to be a balance. What we see in a lot of organizations is an element of lock down, but they can’t lock down as much as they’d like, because the help desk calls go up incredibly as users can’t do this or that. If you lock everyone down and take the big brother approach in the work environment, users are dissatisfied.”

Moyse also notes, because employees are so IT literate, that if users are impeded, they start to look for work arounds. “You often see a department that has one expert user that is really IT literate, install something. And someone else says: ‘Where did you get that?’ And the expert says: ‘I’ll install that for you’ and word gets around how to do it. It’s that viral thing, where someone downloads it and then emails it to three colleagues. That is the nature of the Web and email that has opened up the world to anyone with a PC. The implications for the IT department and the security of the business can be huge. This is the particular challenge with email or the Web; you can’t turn those applications off. You have to have the Internet open for your business.”

Kost agrees that locking employees down is not really an option. “Twenty-odd years ago, when employees came to work, they used the telephone on their desk to make some personal calls during the day, check in on the kids, make a dentist appointment, make a reservation. The modern workforce now are doing those same things with Facebook or Twitter, or other social media and communication tools and keeping up with all those people that in another age they might have called. Users coming to the office expect to use these tools, just like the phone used to be.”

But complete openness is surely not an option either. The 2nd Annual Network Forensics Survey published in October by Solera Networks found that visits to malicious Web sites and instant messaging (IM) use was particularly worrisome, with 96 percent feeling threatened by employee Web activity, and 71 percent fearing that IM poses security threats.

IT Cannot Say No

Employees today have high expectations when it comes to messaging technologies. “People are used to running their own networks at home,” observes Kost. “So, when IT says ‘no’ employees don’t understand why. ‘I can do this at home, why can’t I do it at work?’ IT is finding that ‘no’ doesn’t work. There is an employee moral, cultural thing, which some companies might say, big deal but to attract and retain talent that is a factor. Some of the research we did showed people are willing to make a trade off in compensation for some of this work flexibility, use of tools and applications.”

The Cisco Connected World Report, points to the expectation that employees demand to be able to access information from anywhere, revealing three of every five employees (60 percent) believe it is unnecessary to be in the office to be productive.

This cross of personal and business information and tools can quickly get sticky. As Schlampp points out, “If I bring my iPhone into the office, and I pick up the corporate Wi-Fi, I am sending email, etc. All that email is now going through the corporate network. It could be my Gmail account or it could be my Exchange account. All that data is flowing through the corporate network and I have an identity there. Then I hop onto my laptop, and I have the same identity. All of a sudden, you have a single person using multiple identities on multiple IP addresses and that can become a big problem for security. That is where having the ability to see everything and replay everything and correlate that data is essential.”

Kost says that in most organizations the number one concern is the fine line between company data and user data and how it is stored on that one device. “A policy must be in place that says the company retains the right, if it must, to wipe the device. You need some policy in place that says if you bring your own device in with music that is yours, contacts, etc, that the company can take some security actions, such as monitoring and that some of your personal activity might be captured. It is important that people know that their expectation of privacy might be changed because you are getting onto the network at work. The employee needs to know that backing up personal data is their responsibility and that wiping the device is a possibility. So there is an employee, employer understanding that needs to happen, or a code of ethics or device policy needs to exist independent of the technologies and that can be different in different parts of the world that have different privacy expectations.”

Moyse agrees, noting, “What about the content that is on these machines? At home, I may download iTunes. If I copy that, I have paid for the license, I am legitimately able to use that music on this machine. If I email one of those tracks to someone at work, or put it on a USB key or download off an illegal site at work or if there is an unlicensed music track on a work PC, the Directors of that business are liable for the license. Under UK law, even if the user installed it, you can’t delegate responsibility or liability to the user. A company acceptable use policy says you are not allow to have contents like that, you can fire the employee, you can take action, should the music publisher find out about the download, but it is still the company they are coming after.”

“The challenge we are getting into now is a lot of these sites, for example Twitter or Facebook, you can find a good business reason for using them,” adds Moyse. “Where do you draw the line? If you use it this way, it is beneficial to the company, if you use it that way, it can be dangerous.”

So what is IT to do? “It is easy to think of users as children—they want something, they take it. If they have a problem, they cry and they can’t always explain the problem,” says Borenstein. “It sounds kind of patronizing, but the truth is, if you conceptualize your users this way it can be a useful guide in how to deal with them. In this case, a child has a new toy, he loves his toy, do you tell him, ‘don’t use your toy’ or do you tell him how to change the batteries safely?”

With messaging technology and devices being driven into IT, instead of the former state of out from IT, how does IT get a handle on security? “From our perspective, on the security side, there is a new concept called ‘zero trust’ from Forrester,” says Schlampp. “This is their new framework for thinking about security. The title of it is great: No More Chewy Centers: The Zero Trust Model and they say we should think of the network security world as an M&M. You have this crunchy outer shell, where you kept out all the bad stuff, and inside it was tasty and you knew what it was and you could trust it. Well, no more chewy centers, because inside that M&M you now have all sorts of devices and people that you did not know about or were able to keep out before. But the reality is: We never really had the security that we perceived we did, turns out the chocolate was never that great anyway.”

Schlampp goes on to explain that we can’t treat network security like an M&M anymore. “Basically, you can’t trust anybody on your network, so you have to raise the level of the game of your network security team. Their job is not to just keep people out, their job is to actively monitor what is happening. So that if something bad starts to unfold, you have the tools and capabilities to understand what is happening and shut it down quickly.”

Today, IT is between a rock and a hard place. “IT administrators, the people who run IT departments are people who like to bring order out of chaos, they like control,” believes Borenstein. “Bless those people, I do not know what we would do without them, but I think they are going to have to let go of some of this. The question to ask is not, can they keep these devices out, because there is an easy answer, which is no, instead it is how can we manage the flow of information into and around these devices, how can they make them more secure? There are ways to do that.” Borenstein goes on to say that Mimecast is integrating corporate email with BlackBerry devices so both can be archived and support secure communications. “We are hoping to have that before long for other devices too. The message we would like to give employees is sure, use an iPhone, use a BlackBerry, but run this software so that mail is handled more securely.”

Kost warns that a whole new class of device is imminently expected, as he notes that according to Gartner just under 20 million tablets will ship this year and next year 55 million will ship. “These may or may not replace the laptop, but millions and millions of these devices are going to be out there,” he says.

IT organizations are going to need to rely on the technology more than ever before believes Moyse. “We are going to need to put protection into place that does not hinder the user. A lot of the products now consistently use pop-ups asking the user, do you really want to do this? Is this secure? We are imposing too much on the user. Customers want the best protection they can get, as simply as you can get it, and as cost-effectively as you can get it. There is a great opportunity for the industry if we get this right.”

Consumer Products Impacting Business IT

Stephanie Jordan — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 07:55:27 +0000

Last week, amid much hoopla, Facebook announced its new messaging service meant to unify email, instant messaging, text messaging and its existing messaging system in what it terms a “social inbox”. According to the company, the intention is to remove the barriers that technology can build, pointing to how some people text, some email, some use posts via the Internet. Says Facebook’s Joel Seligstein: “When I want to share with someone it should be as simple as deciding who I want to share with and what I want to say. It should feel more like a human conversation.”

To this end, Facebook unveiled its next evolution of Messages that lets you decide if you want to SMS, chat, email or Message your friends, and your friends can decide how they receive your message, eliminating the need to know or recall how that person prefers to be communicated with.

Every person on Facebook that wants one can get an @facebook email address. While the intent is supposedly not to impact Yahoo! Mail or Gmail – or so says the company, — it’s hard to imagine that if the capabilities are there, that the social inbox cannot help but change consumer messaging, if even a percentage of the more than 500 million members find this way of communicating preferable to email.

The Internet is abuzz with opinions on this announcement; from those saying this will be revolutionary, to those believing that the feature sets are too limiting or complex for the average user to adopt. Matt Cain, currently with Gartner and a long time email analyst, was unimpressed with the announcement saying that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! “must have sighed a breath of relief”.

Forrester analyst Augie Ray believes that “comparing it strictly to email systems” is viewing the announcement in the wrong way and that Facebook is trying to change personal communications.

The reality is perhaps somewhere in between, but it is hard not to expect that once adopted by Facebook’s millions of followers and fans, the new messaging system will make an impact. How this largely consumer oriented offering may have an effect on or inspire us on the business side is impossible to say at this early stage (of the announcement and of the use of Facebook in business). But in an upcoming cover story, I explore how other seemingly consumer focused technologies have infiltrated business organizations of all sizes, and what those impacts have been on IT. For now, we’ll have to wait to see where Facebook’s Messages announcement takes us.

Eye on Messaging is written by Stephanie Jordan, editor in chief of Messaging News. If you have story ideas or news to share, email her: sjordan [at] messagingnews [dot] com