September 25th, 2007

Zimbra plays matchmaker for Comcast and Yahoo!

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 7:18 am

Categories: Digital media, E-communications, Messaging, Web 2.0

Tags: Comcast Corp., Yahoo! Inc., Zimbra, TiVo Inc., Tv & Home Theater, TVs, Internet, Personal Technology, Home Entertainment, Maurene Caplan Grey

Earlier this year, Comcast announced their planned launch of SmartZone Communications Center — targeted for late 2007. Jay Fortner in Read/Write Web offers an excellent description of Smart Zone, components of which will result from Comcast’s technology partnerships with Zimbra (messaging) and Plaxo (contact management).

SmartZone Home Page

Last week, Yahoo! announced that they are acquiring Zimbra. Zimbra is a start-up that “has made a name for itself” through aggressive product development. From Between the Lines:

Zimbra has a browser-based client and supports Windows, Apple, and Linux desktops, as well as Microsoft Outlook a variety of mobile devices. On the server side, Zimbra supports Red Hat, Mac, Ubuntu, SUSE and Fedora. Version 5.0 is due later this year, and adds numerous features, such as multiple mail identities, personal distribution lists, advanced search in the administration console, instant messaging, external directory support and delegated mailbox and mail folders.

Yahoo!’s acquisition of Zimbra offsets Google’s evolving application arsenal. However, I believe that the Zimbra acquisition will be a significant part of a framework leading to a powerful alliance between Yahoo! and Comcast. Read the rest of this entry »

September 19th, 2007

Symphony plays on in Notes 8

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 12:53 pm

Categories: Collaboration, Email, IBM, Messaging, Microsoft, Productivity suites

Tags: Microsoft Office, IBM Lotus Notes, Microsoft Corp., IBM Corp., Media Coverage, E-mail Servers, Groupware, Enterprise Software, Software, Maurene Caplan Grey

It’s the morning after IBM’s Lotus Collaboration Summit, at which IBM announced that the reincarnation of an ODF-compliant Lotus Symphony is integrated into Notes 8 — as well as being offered as a free download. The media coverage conveys that IBM is trying to win over the Microsoft Office market, and the half-page IBM ad in yesterday’s New York Times about the free Symphony download appears to support the “IBM takes on Microsoft Office” mindset. But, I don’t believe that — not for a moment. Read the rest of this entry »

August 2nd, 2007

Xandros and Scalix: A marriage of convenience

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 1:08 pm

Categories: Collaboration, Messaging, Open Source

Tags: Scalix Corp., Xandros, Maurene Caplan Grey

Today’s trivia-by-association question: I say, “Linux.” Quick, what’s your first thought? …  

Xandros is gambling that their transition from a desktop Linux player to an end-to-end Linux platform player will drive Xandros mindshare, so as to position them with the Linux “big boys.” Given the voluminous number of Linux distributions, Xandros’s ambition is lofty — but not insurmountable.

In 2004, Xandros stepped into the server market, and progressively built out their infrastructure platform.

Meanwhile in the Scalix camp, founder Julie Hanna Farris had been skillfully, and aggressively, marketing Scalix as the ”Exchange Killer.“ As ZDNet’s David Berlind wrote back in 2005:

For Scalix’s first trick, it offered an Exchange-compatible e-mail and calendaring server for a fraction of the cost of what it takes to run Exchange.

Though certainly one of the more prevalent voices in the messaging/collaboration world, Scalix hardly has been alone Read the rest of this entry »

July 9th, 2007

Can Postini legitimize Google's enterprise ambitions?

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 3:51 pm

Categories: Email, Messaging, Productivity suites, Security

Tags: Google Inc., Postini Corp., Maurene Caplan Grey

Google has been thundering into the SaaS space with their broadening ”application-of-the-day” suite. Google has portrayed themselves as a productivity suite contender in the enterprise space, which supports today’s announced plan to acquire messaging security provider Postini. However, they face a Mount Everest-like uphill climb. Google needs to shed their pure-play consumer image, in favor of a provider for consumer and enterprise services. As my ZDNet colleagues, Dan Farber and Larry Dignan, point out in their post today:

With Postini, as well as its recent partnership with Salesforce, it’s clear that Google sees itself as an on-demand enterprise applications provider. The big question is whether enterprises will see Google that way.

Google’s venture into the enterprise space is further burdened by highly publicized privacy issues.  Read the rest of this entry »

June 22nd, 2007

Good email can take the ISP fast lane

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 10:45 am

Categories: Email, Messaging, Security, Spam, email marketing

Tags: Internet Service Provider, E-mail, Maurene Caplan Grey

Comcast, Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner and Verizon have joined Yahoo and AOL in adopting the CertifiedMail reputation program from Goodmail Systems.

Courtesy of Slashdot’s “something-to-think-about dept,” CmdrTaco asks What Happens If You Don’t Pay for Goodmail?  (Read CmdrTaco’s blog for an objective analysis of both sides of the debate.) 

[Here's] the Catch 22: If an ISP gives the same deliverability to non-Goodmail-certified messages, then who’s going to use it? On the other hand, if an ISP gives better deliverability to Goodmail-certified messages than to other messages (much more likely), then they are to some extent misrepresenting the services they sell to their users, since users expect an ISP to make the best effort to deliver all legitimate e-mails, not just the ones from paying senders.

A Moyers on America article provides an analogy in describing Net Neutrality. The analogy is equally applicable to reputation-based email:

For those companies that pay the fee, their content would breeze through the fast-pass lane at the toll bridge, reaching users more quickly; those who don’t pay will be stuck in the crowded, slow-moving line, and users will have to wait longer for their content to load.

An email message travels many Internet roads to reach its destination. During its journey, it “stops” at way stations — many of which are ISPs. Within the inner sanctum of Sender Reputation stakeholders, Goodmail has earned a marketing coup. It is a long way to the finish line (of protocol acceptance); however, Goodmail’s marketing coup was picked up by the trade press and perception (positive or negative) can appear to be reality.

June 4th, 2007

Incriminating email goes amuck

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 1:37 pm

Categories: Email, Messaging, Records management

Tags: E-mail, Maurene Caplan Grey

The Courts routinely subpoenae email messages, and people routinely use email to incriminate themselves.

I had supressed, until now, the urge to comment on the Karl Rove missing-email fiasco; however, it keeps getting juicier. The story, so far, goes like this…

• Critics say that the Rove staff used the Republican National Committee (RNC) email system to circumvent the record-keeping policies for messages sent through the White House email system.
• 5 million email messages are declared to be missing from the RNC email system.
• 500 of Rove staff email messages are discovered. Inadvertently, they were sent to the wrong email address. The recipient contacted investigative reporter Greg Palast. Palast contacted Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others.
• Separately, NBC reported that

In January 2006, Rove’s ability to use a “double delete function” was removed so he could no longer manually delete and then empty his delete file. … Officials could not explain why or what prompted this.

Oh what a tangled email web we weave, When first we practice to deceive. (With apologies to Sir Walter Scott)

May 31st, 2007

Email Abdicates Its Throne

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 12:16 pm

Categories: E-communications, Email, Messaging, Unified Communications, Unified Messaging

Tags: Electronic Communication, E-mail, Maurene Caplan Grey

In April and May, I conducted a quick poll  – asking “What media do you use? Multiple answers allowed.” The 444 responses broke out as follows:

My Web site readership is composed primarily of enterprise knowledge workers. A quick analysis of the responses shows that email continues to be the predominant means of e-communications — however, “by a nose.” (With the exception of Twitter, other one-to-many types of e-communication, e.g., blogs and Web conferencing, were not part of the poll). Not surprisingly, people are increasingly using multiple forms of e-communications. However, I’d bet that each communication media is used independently. The greater the number of e-communication media being used, the greater the risk for information overload.

Play Video

Tech Test: Twitter.com Informs, Overwhelms  Associated Press - (APTN) Apr. 11, 2007. 01:48 PM EST.

I’m typing this blog post from INBOX 2007. Jeff Ressler of Microsoft delivered this morning’s keynote on unified communications (UC). UC pulls the various types of e-communications into one messaging stream. To the user, silos are gone.

Today, UC is marketing buzz within the “average” enterprise — which is earnestly watching the early adopter, UC-enabled enterprises.

To be clear, email messaging is not going away. Rather, increasingly it is being augmented by other, synergistic types of messaging (some text, some voice, some visual… ). Email is abdicating its throne in favor of becoming a member of the e-communications community — a key member with a rich history, but still a member.

I’ll be blogging my commentary this week from INBOX.

April 27th, 2007

Enterprise communication: Flexibility trumps security

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 6:50 am

Categories: Collaboration, Email, Messaging, Security, Social communities, Web 2.0

Tags: Security, Electronic Communication, Knowledge Worker, IM, Messaging, E-mail, Maurene Caplan Grey

Before wireless email became commonplace, executive management would often forward their most important email messages from their corporate account to their free, consumer email account (e.g., hotmail) – so that they could access them at a public kiosk while traveling.

Consumer instant messaging (IM), and the plethora of free "2.0" e-communication systems, are today's traffickers of business information. No longer the primary domain of executive management, everyone can participate in the risk of exposing private information on public networks. Tools that are free, easy and fun, while serving some business purpose, will be used by the average knowledge worker. Witness consumer instant messaging. 

As the knowledge worker decides how best to communicate, flexibility trumps security.

• Let me (the knowledge worker) choose the method by which I communicate, and I'll be more productive. 
• Business units and IT, sanction my choice of e-communication tools and the organization will be flatter and more productive.

The need for flexibility drove the executive to forward business messages to her consumer email account. However, today the traveling executive normally accesses her business messages through a secured Web or mobile session to the corporate email server. As consumer IM became a near staple of enterprise communications, enterprise-level, third-party "connectors" arrived to secure those IM sessions.

With the current explosion of new consumer e-communication media, an unending parade of enterprise-level (i.e., secure) unified communication suites are surfacing — with the supply-side vendors are one-upping each other, near daily. View Microsoft's announcement of the Microsoft-Nortel alliance, followed by Marguerite Reardon's (CNET News.com) report.

[Cisco] has been pursuing several new markets, such as telephony and video, over the past few years to find new growth markets. So far, Unified Communications is proving to be a winner. During the company's second-quarter earnings call in February, executives said that sales of its Unified Communications products had increased 38 percent compared with a year ago. … Even though sales seem to be strong for this product line, Cisco will likely continue to compete against some tough competitors, including Microsoft, which is working with voice veteran Nortel Networks.

Freedom of choice and data security need not be mutually exclusive. Nonetheless, the average Enterprise is wary to spend money on emerging e-communication technologies, or securing those already on-site – even as the average Enterprise User downloads any tool that provides him with the greatest communicative flexibility. 

April 12th, 2007

Unified messaging is legacy

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 8:35 am

Categories: Email, Messaging, Unified Communications, Unified Messaging, Voice Services

Tags:

VoIP Loop blogger, Blair Pleasant, asks Is Unified Messaging Still Relevant?

There is a premium for UM [unified messaging] over plain voice mail, plus the integration costs can be not insignificant. And then there’s the integration issues – UM isn’t generally plug and play. And lastly, the ever-present ROI [return on investment] issue – ROI for UM has been very difficult to prove.

Additionally, in its purest form, UM (a single mail queue for email , voice mail and fax messages) has never lived up to its heyday hype. Follow-me uses store-and-forward routing. Early UM systems didn't always clean up after themselves (i.e., empty the store  queue of forwarded messages.) For example, a voice mail message is forwarded to your email inbox as a wave file. You listen to it and delete it. Later you dial into your voice mail and find the same voice message. UM's legacy prevented it from mainstreaming into and across businesses.

What's the difference between unified messaging and unified communications? From a purist perspective, UC means near real-time  communications (instead of store-and-forward), which integrate with line-of-business processes and workflow. However, with the mushrooming of UC hype, the difference between UM and UC will be semantics. UC sounds sexier than UM, yet UM dressed in the UC emperor's clothes is still UM. 

April 10th, 2007

Freeing the message from the INBOX

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 9:03 am

Categories: Email, INBOX, Messaging, Security, Unified Communications, Unified Messaging, VoIP, Voice Services

Tags:

Ten years ago, I installed monstrous email gateways that allowed for message flow between disparate, proprietary email systems — internal to the organization. Despite patchwork "solutions," sending email messages outside of the organization was a pipedream. 

The Internet created as much of a buzz then, as does "2.0" today. To that point, check out this 1997 presentation, which opens with:

• What's needed for mission-critical messaging?
• What about security and reliability?
• Can Internet mail technology do the job?

Ten years later and the same questions are being asked – not due to lack of progress. Rather, these issues have come full circle owing to the freedom inherent in Internet messaging.

More so, messaging has come to mean more than email — it's VoIP, instant messaging, chat, video mail… It is core to unified communications and collaboration –flavors of which are becoming as mission critical to the organization as email is today. The messaging industry, as a whole, is at a juncture, and "lessons learned" through email are not being fully leveraged.

I am this year's conference director for INBOX 2007, which means that I was able to develop the tracks and assign sessions to address this concerns.

1. If you were me, what track or session topics would you include? 
2. What are your pressing business and technology concerns?