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Email is a king of communication in every company. Many companies are literally run by email. People are using it for different purposes -notification, collaboration and very often even record management. You can hear many discussions about how companies can replace or integrate email with enterprise and social collaboration tools. I captured some of them in my previous blogging: How engineers find path from emails and messages to collaboration?; PLM Workflows and Google Actionable Emails; DIY PLM and Zero Email Policy; PLM Messaging and WhatsApp Moment.

You may think email doesn’t change. I wanted to share with you two interesting examples related to changes and innovation in email that caught my attention for the last few weeks. The Verge article speaks about Gmail API announcement.

Google announced that any app could now talk to Gmail using today’s faster, more modern languages — languages that every web developer speaks. The Gmail API lets you ask Google for threads, messages, drafts, and labels three to ten times faster than with IMAP. What it can do is provide an interface for any app to interact on a small scale with your Gmail account without having to create an entire mail client. When that happens, Google won’t have replaced email — it will have actually extended it. Instead of killing email as some hoped it would, the Gmail API gives email new life.

The following video present some additional details about Gmail API usage. Take 5 minutes to watch it, especially places where video speaks about integration between Gmail and enterprise systems.

Another example comes from TNW article – Inbox launches as an open-source email platform to replace legacy protocols.

A new startup, Inbox, is launching its “next-generation email platform” as an alternative to aging protocols like IMAP and SMTP. The core of Inbox’s efforts is an Inbox Sync Engine for developers that adds a modern API on top of mail providers, including Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook.com.

As stated in the article, Inbox is a platform play. The intent of founders is to create new generation of messaging platform. And it is an open source play. The first step for Inbox is to create Sync engine that can expose existing email providers:

The core of Inbox is an open source sync engine that integrates with existing email services like Gmail, and exposes a beautiful, modern REST API. We’re pleased to announce that beginning today, you can download the Inbox engine, sync an account, and begin building on top of Inbox in your local development environment.

These articles made me think about a potential play PLM and engineering application can make by building their collaboration application tightly integrated with email services. It will allow better communication for people and ease of data integration between PLM solutions and communication platforms such as emails. You may see it as a pure technical play. Who cares how to integrate email and data? However, in my view, this is a place where differentiation in user experience and seamless data integration can become a critical to drive user adoption.

What is my conclusion? It is very hard to change people’s habits. Email is part of our every day routine. Existing systems are integrated with email, but the way it done as well as the level of data integration is very sporadic. Lots of unstructured data about customers, engineering decisions, requirements and many others stuck in the email and lost there forever. New email approach may help to have transparent and seamless integration between business applications and email. It  can make a difference for users. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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