Will Salesforce Chatter Neuter Microsoft Office and SharePoint?

On the Friday before Dreamforce, I read an interesting article in MIT Technology Review, entitled “Fixing E-Mail” that offered insights from the recently completed Defrag 2009 conference.

As I read it, I was struck by two comments attributed to Lili Cheng, general manager of Microsoft’s future social experiences labs. The first is a direct quote while the other is comes directly from the article.

• “E-mail is kind of this giant, endless task list, and you're really the slave to a lot of stuff that comes to you.” The article goes on to add that Ms. Cheng “believes that incoming messages need to be organized and sorted in a more automated fashion.”
• “Cheng said her group found that about 70 percent of the e-mail people receive is information they don't actually need to read, though many like to have it on file. Her group built a prototype that created a different section of the in-box for this type of e-mail and extracted a daily summary of it that could be displayed to the user.”

After reading this, here’s my visceral reaction:

• Thanks to its success with Outlook, Microsoft is largely responsible for e-mail enslaving us to “giant, endless task list(s).”
• E-mail is not a collaboration platform. Because I sent you an e-mail asking for help or requesting that you perform a specific activity or set of tasks, that doesn’t guarantee that you’re even going to read my message. That’s not collaboration. In the old days that would be called “shifting the monkey.” My burden is now yours … or vice versa.
• If Marc Benioff is right about Chatter adoption, I’ll bet that a large percentage of internal e-mails will shift from Outlook to his new cloud offering. The ease of using Facebook and Twitter will make it a preferred collaboration platform compared to SharePoint, and an alternative to dead intranet sites. This could easily result in a tighter relationship with Google Apps … and possibly IBM’s Lotus group, too. I hope Marc’s budgeted for a lot of new storage.

I don’t know about you, but I’m eager to lose the shackles of Outlook.

Comments

[Dennis Moore, C3]

Bruce -

I don't think it's Outlook's fault that we are enslaved to an endless list of requests by others. As with taxes on a minority of the population, people are more than willing to create an endless burden on others. Add to that the desire of people to say "well I emailed you about it and you didn't respond, so I went ahead with what I wanted to do," and you have a recipe for an endless stream of emails. If only we had to pay postage for e-mail messages, you'd see a lot more selectivity in the sending. Looking forward to an update soon ...

[Sam O]

Bruce, I find that you tend to have a short term fascination with whatever you've seen lately. Must have been a visit to Salesforce this week, or maybe they just renewed their AMR contract. In any case, Outlook is a lot more than e-mail, but you must not know that. It can be a launch point for IM, video and voice chat, and many other communications and collaboration mechanisms. It can even be the contextual window into line of business applications. Add to that the overall Unified Communications work that Microsoft is doing, and you have a very compelling set of components and infrastructure for embedded collaboration in any application. Microsoft is making presence and collaboration capabilities available to developers to include in their own offerings. And don't get me started about Google Wave. Wave is basically very limited Groupware that mimics persistent IM sessions. Most of the functionality that has gathered attention is Google gadgets, which have virtually nothing to do with Wave.

[Trevor Miles]

Bruce, I am somewhere between Dennis and Sam. At work we have email, IM, a "community" based on Jive, and SharePoint. We also have a web site and salesforce - CRM and Service - and we are just getting IP phones launched from the IM.

Firtly, I would love to see a more "unified" application or service that allowed me to do all of my "communication" in a single UI and perhaps even move the companies website on to a web 2.0 platform so that it is more dynamic. So I agree that a new paradigm is needed, but I can't "blame" Microsoft for the current paradigm. I don't see a different paradigm currently available from Google - GMail is the worst email system out there - or salesforce or ...

Secondly, many people still send me an email asking me if I am available to chat, and then call me on a land line. In other words there is a lot of human behaviour to change before we can achieve greater productivity from new tools.

Lastly, if I am a gauge of the adoption on social media, then we have already reached the peak. I cannot stand twitter and my facebook time has dwindled dramatically. LinkedIn has replaced email spam and mail-order environmental damage. I am very sceptical of any product review I see on Amazon or elsewhere because I know companies are hiring people to say "oh my gosh, this is like the best product evverrr :-)".

[Bruce Richardson]

Sam O,

Thank you for being Microsoft's chief apologist. I'm sure there is a Zune with your name on it. The stuff that Zimbra was working on before getting acquired by Yahoo was light years ahead of where Outlook is going.

I long for the day that my email system is smart enough to know whether the sender is a client or prospect (and place that correspondence in context) instead of someone trying to sell me mailing lists or other junk. This should have been the killer app for Duet, the ill-fated collaboration between Microsoft and SAP.

Bruce

[Jonathan Shoolman]

Bruce,

Distinguishing between e-mails that require action and the rest of the e-mail flood is easily accomplished today in a growing number of large and mid-size enterprises that rely on Microsoft Outlook for e-mail. However, basic e-mail does not distinguish between regular e-mail and e-mail initiated to launch a human-centric process that needs to be managed, visible to those involved, support accountability, and provide an audit trail for future audit purposes if needed.

ActionBase - a Microsoft Partner based in Tel Aviv Israel has developed a solution to this problem that tightly integrates with Microsoft Outlook and Word. It also employs Microsoft Excel reporting services, and for management reporting and dashboards it integrates with Microsoft SharePoint Server. ActionMail operates within Outlook, enabling enterprise class e-mail and more. ActionMails are managed within a user's ActionBox folder(s) that reside within Outlook alongside regular e-mail folders. ActionMail takes the traditional flood of individual e-mails normally associated with an action item that may involve multiple participants and reduces it to a single line item to be managed in the ActionBox. ActionMails may have a time-line associated with them as well as automatic reminders for both sender and recipients. Data is stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database, so audit-ability and accountability are maintained.

More complex human-centric processes involving multiple action items are also easily managed with ActionDocs. ActionDoc extends the familiar Microsoft Word toolset. ActionDocs are managed and visible right from within Outlook and live right alongside of ActionMails. Within an ActionDoc, Action Items are identified and delivered to the responsible party/parties as ActionMail while the complete ActionDoc is "published" and delivered to those ActionBase users that require visibility into the complete process defined within the ActionDoc. ActionDocs are relied upon to manage a wide variety of human-centric processes across the silos of various types of enterprises where missed deadlines or information falling between the cracks could result in regulatory fines or sanctions, or compromised workgroup performance/results. Action Items can be delivered to responsible parties using any e-mail client when participants outside the enterprise (suppliers, customers, consultants, etc.) are involved. ActionBase provides enterprise class tools and control in a familiar Microsoft Outlook environment. When traditional e-mail is insufficient, when Business Process Management (BPM) tools are too rigid and I.T. dependent, and when traditional Project Management tools are too onerous, ActionBase may be the right solution. You and your readers can judge for yourselves.

A growing number of Fortune 1000 companies and other enterprises have adopted the ActionBase solution. It's used in financial services, utilities, oil and gas, manufacturing, telecom, university, healthcare, military, and other settings.

ActionBase is available through ActionBase and ActionBase Authorized Distributors. Technology Works, Inc. based in West Chester, PA is the ActionBase distributor for the USA. ActionBase is also currently available in Canada, Israel, Western Europe, Singapore, and South Africa with broader distribution planned.

You are welcome to contact me for more information. You can find me on LinkedIn, call me at Technology Works (610-430-1830 x100).

Regards,

Jonathan Shoolman
Technology Works, Inc.
West Chester, PA (USA)

[Bruce Richardson]

Jonathan,

Normally I would have edited out the blatant marketing stuff. I made an exception because I have actually interviewed some of your people in Israel and like what ActionBase is doing.

By the way, I'm not as kind with repeat offenders.

Bruce

[Jonathan Shoolman]

Bruce,

My apology for the marketing content. No need to worry about any repeat offense. Your kind words about what ActionBase is doing are appreciated.

Jonathan