IBM wants to take on email and today released its new email product called IBM Verse. It believes like so many before it, that the problem with email is the presentation, not the medium itself, but the real issue is that it’s been abused, used as a communications and collaboration tool it’s just not well suited for.
IBM’s answer is to throw some design sense at the problem, and mix it with analytics and intelligence and when you’re done, you have a smarter and more usable email tool, and it seems to work to some extent, but it doesn’t really address the fundamental underlying issues with email, no matter how pretty or well designed it is.
When you look at its tool kit though, it’s a lot like Cisco’s Project Squared tool I wrote about yesterday in that you can do a number of communications and collaboration tasks all within in a single, well-designed interface. The tool combines email, meetings, calendars, file sharing, instant messaging, social updates, video chats and more.
In that sense it’s like a lot of email and collaboration platforms including Outlook, but it wants to be much more than that and use its analytics capabilities to help you surface the people and email that matter most and see connections among the people who are part of any communications string.
The idea with this approach is to use intelligence to surface the content that matters most to you in your Inbox. The real proof of this application will be in the using. It’s hard to know how well this will work until you try it. IBM plans to even bring Watson into the equation in a future release (it doesn’t say quite when) where you can use Watson to search across the collaboration platform to find the best answers to any particular query.
IBM says Verse is also part of the partnership with Apple to bring enterprise software to the iPad, but even though the people panel across the top looks a lot like iOS 8, IBM told me they developed this interface independently of Cupertino. Perhaps, great minds really do think alike.
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