Ontopic: I agree with Dave: Legacy and interoperability. Email still has to work with email outside of Notes or outside of the enterprise.

I’m left with 3 thoughts after reading your, again, very informative comments
1) In your points 1 to 5 you describe what seem to me to be more or less techincal problems
2) You are right to ask where does it all begin and end. To be human is to communicate (and to err) but to win the war we must choose our battles, so I see a fairly distinctive line around generic corp comms: IM, email and group email. Featuresets such as collaboration vary from team to team, company to company.
3) After reading your post I now see that we are talking about features of communications and what is needed is to wrap those disparate options in to a UI…

I, as a user, would now like the following;

1) When I want to talk to someone I first think of the person. So the address book should be the front end, it will show me if their IM is on, if they’re traveling, timezone, PTO etc. From there I can make a decision as to how to contact them; SIP, SMS, IM, Email etc You highlight a very important issue “I often do IM like activities with email” and that is because we find ourselves within the email construct when our A.D.D. brain sidetracks, it is easier to im within email than to launch, search and generate and IM. I think a little ‘barrier to entry’ might actually aid the overall system here.

2) At the other end I do not want my attention diluted across different application windows. I want the system to understand my state of presense and direct incoming communication accordingly. I fully appreciate this is way out, but it is where we should be going.

These are lofty and ill defined requirements but I am wary of delving right in to implementation constraints without first giving a cursory glance at how I want to operate as a human, in what is a fundamental function of my being. I have two primary senses for comms; sight and hearing, the top presentation layer of the UI should have filtered/combined/funneled the system features to make the HCI as simple and transparent as possible.

This translates in to a unified address book, the direction google and yahoo are taking. And a new intelligent layer on top of the apps at the receiving end, an incoming personal assistant if you will.

It is very easy to look at the current implementation of Notes and see that they are pushing the system features out to the user and then trying to apply UCD after the fact. I’m told the next major revision is falling in to the same trap.

finally, thank you for your time and insight, a nice learning experience – regards.

on and on this goes. combining the 3 facets of communication you mentioned to me goes on and on and doesn’t even deal with other areas of collaborative information management:
reputation management
folksonomy and other metadata standards
public vs. private
controlled environments vs. unstructured (wiki vs. email vs. CMS vs. blog vs. sharepoint, etc.)

and again, on and on. Where does it all end and begin?

An aspect I haven’t seen mentioned here in the IM v Email discussion is filtering. From the perspective of enabling communication, the low level pings that are IM are filtered out of your inbox when you have IM functionality between both parties. I feel there are currently too many barriers holding back IM from user’s communication mindset, e.g. different apps, different standards.

A fault with email; you can send anyone an email without their permission. Is a flaw with IM; both parties must go through the effort of inviting and categorizing each other. Its hard to conceive of a solution to these contradictions at either end.

Off the top of my head I would divide my business communication in to three general types.
IM: immediate, instantaneous, disposable
Email: detailed, discussion, debate, recorded
Group: broadcast, announcements, meetings

The recognized issue is that all three are coming in on one channel. Notes has tried, and will continue to fail it seems, to wrap this up in one solution. I’m not sure why the recipe is so hard to find, your thoughts?

There is definitely a generational aspect to this as well, but even within a single generation I notice that there is a divide between those that find IM and similar synchronous communication to be too much of a disruption b/c it is too easy and too impersonal compared to a phone (synchronous) or email (asynch).

Here’s what would be required: and you and I were logged into IM (specifically iChat), and I had your IM screen name in an address book card, along with the email address you emailed from. When I got your email, a small icon would appear in a column of my mail client, allowing me to reply to your email via iChat. There’s also a button available on the read window to allow email reply via iChat as well.

I’ve seen adoption of IM increase significantly in distributed work environments. Probably in parallel with the outsourcing phenomonen.

Email was abused when people needed a quick ping ‘will you be on the call’,'we need your opinion on this customer issue’,'can you join the meeting now?’ etc. These instantanious and disposable pings were/are clogging our inboxes.

People are still learning when each tool is appropriate. Thats part of the reason for the growth of IM and ‘decline’ of mail. More of an adjustment than a phasing out of email.

I think these comments are too contextualized. I think this is about life stages and context of use. To say we are moving away from Email and towards chat/IM to me doesn’t make sense. I see where “presence” notification within e-mail is useful and the ability to toggle between email and IM/Chat is useful as well, but that does not mean that email is going away or even lessoning.

Sometimes, asynchronousity is just required and I believe that the older one gets the more it is required.

Here is an example. My friend and I used to IM all the time and talk on the phone and get together for lunch. We barely ever emailed and we never thought of SMS text messaging even though we always had the ability.

Boom! Parenthood. All the synchronous options disappear from our lives and now text messaging is the way to go. Now you could say that IM is just as asynchronous as text messaging, except you are not always at the same terminal, but you do always have the same telephone. You can respond when you are ready and my friend and I both being parents understand that a response may not be instant (thus not instant messaging).

But further, we also e-mail more b/c we realize that even Text messaging is pushing the person to respond in a way that may be inappropriate given their social situation.

But let’s talk about work. When ya leave the MySpace generation you end up going to where? Oh! right! I have to work for a living. Synchronous communication abounds and grows, but it is also VERY disruptive.

Every management class I have gone to in the last 3 years has started out saying that electronic communications are disruptive to productivity more than they are helpful. Now that extreme statement I take with a lot of grains of salt, but there is definitely something to it that shouldn’t be ignored.

And because many people separate their work communications from their personal communications (I.e. 1 done in office and one done at home), it makes even less sense to connect them through a synchronous communication device.

Now, will social morays change over time? Possibly. But I see the context of use as being too powerful for these changes to move at light speed.