What
is unified communication?
Entrepreneur Toby Ruckert knows what
‘unified communications’ is and you don’t have to spend much time with Toby—as
I have recently done in Singapore--to believe the importance of what might be
described as a movement--or perhaps migration is a better word--toward
unified communication as a popular, if not indispensable, service.
Unified
communication means bringing all our communication
threads and sources (email, social media, chat and ‘check-in’ apps) together in
one place. And, that is what Toby’s
company Unified Inbox does. With 8,000
users waiting for beta versions, the popularity of the notion is significant
and growing.
Once communication sources are wrangled
into a single inbox, users can manage all communications in one place, one screen. Managing might mean ranking messages by
importance, or grouping by source (people) or topics, or other meaningful
criteria. Such features are showing up
more and more within a given medium.
See, for example, the proliferation of ‘filtering’ tools popping up.
G-mail users can request and get helpful analytics regarding your email use patterns.
Other applications, like Checky, Moment and Offtime allow you toggle off and otherwise manage your incoming media to get a digital break. So, the ‘Filter Wars’ have begun.
G-mail users can request and get helpful analytics regarding your email use patterns.
Other applications, like Checky, Moment and Offtime allow you toggle off and otherwise manage your incoming media to get a digital break. So, the ‘Filter Wars’ have begun.
Unified communications, however, goes beyond filtering within a single medium.
Unified communication services allow users to carry on conversations with friends
or colleagues, who are each using different messaging media (say LinkedIn, Facebook, WeChat, SnapChat, etc.) without launching
and re-launching different apps. Users could cut and paste text across platforms, but bridging fractures and inconsistencies between communication streams is hard work.
Unified Inbox will ultimately allow organisations to 'unify' their communications and help interested users to improve their communication patterns and performance (effectiveness and efficiency). The latter is a research project I am currently working on with colleagues in academia and industry.
