Michael Sampson Gets It! Integrated Collaboration Is Where It's At

Michael Sampson has posted part one of a planned two part white paper Collaboration Software Clients: Email, IM, Presence, RSS & Collaborative Workspaces Should Be Integrated for Business Communication. Having recently had several conversations with Michael, and having gotten some very speedy and apt responses from him as I did a semi-brain-dump about the vision of collaboration that I briefly outlined in my recent post about IBM's Activity Explorer, I'm convinced that Michael has his finger firmly on the pulse of both where collaboration is, and where it has to go. Part one of the paper is a concise exposition of where collaboration is, and of the need to go beyond where we are. I'm eager to see what Michael will have to say in part two.

I think that he and I are very much in agreement. There are simply too many disjoint technologies used to collaborate today, and too many metaphors for initiating, receiving, finding and participating in collaboration. We rely far too much on email, which in many respects is the worst collaborative tool in our arsenal. We need to pull together the best of the buddy list , presence, mutliple network and application protocols, multiple platforms, best route and follow-me, push and pull, filters and rules, programmability and workflow, shared workspaces, and remote/disconnected access, and security... all under the umbrella of one intuitive client. It can be done. I'm convinced of that.

P.S. By "semi-brain-dump", I mean "semi - (brain-dump)", not "(semi-brain) - dump", although I'll admit to the possibility that in my case the two expressions might really be equivalent