Email changed the world for business and consumer alike. Imagine it; a cheap and easy way to communicate with each other without using voicemail, fax, or the post office. While a boon for business communication, email has significant flaws that we continue to live with today. So, whats wrong with email?

• Limited ways to prioritize what deserves reading or replying can be overwhelming
• Search on most email clients is terrible cant find what you need
• Knowledge in emails limited to people participating directly no good for future team members
• Used to collaborate something it was never intended or designed to do

There are ways dodge these problems, but they require installing additional tools and using clever processes. This is fine for people with the time and knowledge, but most dont have either.

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Last week I had the opportunity to chat with the folks over at Tungle, a Web 2.0 start-up attacking the problem of scheduling meetings with people outside of your organization.  Today, the typical solution is a whole lot of e-mailing back and forth.  With Tungle, the process is somewhat automated, saving a great deal of time and effort.

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This week was the 15th annual Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Florida.  It was my 15th as well, although my count includes three Lotuspheres in Europe.  

IBM unleashed a fire hose of announcements at the opening general session.  We’ll try to walk through the most interesting ones here.  It’s a lot of material but you should read through it regardless of whether you use mostly IBM tools or mostly Microsoft tools as there are implications here for all.

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Watching the political discussions these days it seems that everyone is fighting to be the “agent of change”, but in the collaboration world is “change” always good?  Or should we perhaps consider that some folks just don’t want to change?

Yeah, it’s probably a pretty poor analogy to tie the political landscape into collaboration, but one of the key issues that collaboration managers continually face is an “unwillingness” to change, perhaps the exact opposite of what we’re seeing as the driving issue in politics right now.  Many collaboration (and arguably many other application) efforts have failed because they required too much change on the part of users.  Let’s face it, when it comes to how people communicate and collaborate, change is often disruptive, leading to frustration from increased communication complexity and lost productivity.

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