For many years I have been saying 'email is for losers'. The way email is used and the way email systems have been designed — I felt there is something fundamentally wrong with the picture. Some examples that highlight this are:
- people/organizations do not know how to use email — or how to manage it over the long-term (i.e. where to file it, how to store it, etc.)
- the folder structure inherit to email systems in general is inadequate for effective information management
- there is no reasonable retention mechanism — unless you consider a call from the IT department announcing 'you have too much email, please delete immediately' effective
Recall the 'good old times' when there was no email system and we relied on a simple system of ink/paper for sending mail. One cannot dispute that the correspondence/communication had clear structure as well the documents themselves. If this was possible for paper-based communication then why it can't be extended to electronic communication— and to any document created today?
We already have the capability to send a document within an application (MS Office, StarOffice, OpenOffice, etc.). What is lacking is the capability to store the communication ('email') in the same manner as we are able to store the other documents. Also lacking is the ability, tools, and structure to enable the inclusion of meta data on these types of documents.
What we should have is:
- an open standard for all types of documents including email, which you can say is a document with routing properties
- a common repository for documents— a storage architecture/database rather than relying on the file system and directory structure
It would then be possible to have a (database) engine to facilitate creation, access, and retrieval of the stored documents/data — independent of the client in use.
Benefits:
- For End-users — No need to manage folders. Automated retention. Automated/assisted association between related documents
- For IT departments - Centralized storage for all documents. More efficient and complete backup and disaster recovery processes.
- For Business - More manageable retention policies, security and compliance.
Additional systems accessing the storage—data mining, search, collaboration, contextual association, workflow.
What it would it mean to you:
- getting rid of systems like GroupWise, Exchange or Domino on the back end
- keeping software which allows us to manage documents.
Here you can see the diagram of email 2.0
email2.0.pdf Comments (3)
Vaclav Vincalek August 13th, 2007 04:58:53 PM
An architecturally superior structure, but it's based on a organization model, vs a personal model.
I'd be interested in applying security profiles and attributes to the documents as they are created/received/stored.
So what have you got?
Aaahh... a very good question, thank you. It brings up another favourite topic of mine—Identity Management. You are correct in that the proposed scenario was meant for organizations, rather than individuals. Organizations have some control over knowing who their users are. However, so far we have not been able to establish the same for individuals on the Internet. There are currently a number of attempts under way from various vendors and open source communities to develop a system that works at the individual level. However, to date no one solution has achieved universal adoption—yet. My guess is that the first such solution will come from the community of public web-based email system providers.
You may argue this idea is no different than my original proposal. True—to some extent. However, a key difference is that in order for this to work at the individual level, providers must agree to a common standard and be able to recognize multiple credentials from various authorities in order to verify an individual's identity. As there are numerous identity issuers (or certifiers) now—this would be extended to include banks, governments, the post office, etc. in order to provide mulitple avenues for identity verification. I would further add that for a system of this nature to work, it must act on messages that are centrally stored and managed rather than distributed and stored locally on each individual's system. Locally stored emails would become a part of history.
Hello Vaclav,
Noticed your ad on CL, somehow linked to your website and your blog.
Symantec, Quest, Messagelab, etc offer simialr solutions based your ideas some time ago, there are some orgnaztions in Vancouver implemented as far as I know.