You Have New Mail: Messaging Technologies for the New Millennium
Messaging vendors are already looking beyond marketing issues--simple mail routing, directory integration and collaborative applications--toward new technologies that will add value to the enterprise messaging infrastructure, such as the unified inbox and instant/real-time messaging.

Unified Inbox

Perpetually on the horizon, unified messaging promises to deliver voicemail, fax, video and any other form of stored communications medium, in addition to traditional electronic messaging. But supporting this type of messaging means having to agree on standards for telephony integration and media storage formats, and seeing eye to eye on issues including large datastores on messaging servers and network-level QoS (quality of service) guarantees to support the storage and bandwidth demands of multimedia messaging.

While every vendor we spoke with proclaimed its readiness to provide the underlying message store, few were willing to promise that a unified message box would be a reality within the next year. Clearly, there are real advantages to integrating all forms of messaging into a single mailbox, but the jury's still out on whether the technical headaches will outweigh the financial savings of replacing existing in-house voicemail systems. On the other hand, don't be surprised if your phone company soon offers unified messaging as a hook for outsourced electronic messaging.

Instant/Real-Time Messaging

Another interesting development is the so-called real-time collaboration system. More than just a simple chat session, real-time collaboration incorporates the ability to track a user's "digital presence." According to Lotus, Notes products now in development support real-time messaging and awareness. These products reportedly will let an e-mail reader see, for example, whether the sender is currently logged in, based on the color of the "From:" line of the message. A click could launch a real-time chat session or, conceivably, a videoconference connection. It's unclear whether either of these constitute critical business functions, but the addition of synchronous communication to an e-mail system certainly holds merit. For instance, a very simple yet urgent question could theoretically be answered on the fly (a quick chat session if the other party is online), instead of placing a long-distance phone call.

Instant messaging technologies aren't really new, and so far have found their widest acceptance with personal users throughout the Internet. Simple chat programs such as IRC (Internet Relay Chat) have been in use for years, while more recent technologies like Mirabilis' ICQ have delivered instant messaging and awareness to millions of newcomers on the Internet.