The Universal Mailbox Arrives - Sort Of

from the May 1996 issue of Business Communications Review.

by Eric Arnum, editor of the newsletter Electronic Mail & Messaging Systems, which tracks the markets for email and fax worldwide. He can be reached at earnum@rcn.com.

Abstract:

Finally, after six years of delays, new client-server messaging architectures are hitting the market. Lotus (Cambridge, MA) launched Lotus Notes Release 4 in January, followed by Microsoft's (Redmond, WA) long-awaited Microsoft Exchange Server in April. Meanwhile, Novell (Orem, UT) is hoping to bring its GroupWise XTD messaging system to market, perhaps as early as September.

The Big Three are hoping that new integrating, unifying features will motivate many more customers to replace their current email, voice mail and fax systems. While Lotus, Microsoft and Novell together control nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of the LAN-based email market - or approximately 30.7 million out of a total of 47.3 million LAN-based mailboxes worldwide - companies like Lucent Technologies (formerly AT&T, Berkeley Heights, NJ), Octel (Milpitas, CA), Centigram (San Jose) and Siemens Rolm (San Jose) lead the voice mail systems market, and Japanese consumer electronics and office equipment companies dominate the fax market.

Novell is getting close to what most people mean when they talk about having a single mailbox: It's less about storing messages in one place and more about transforming them from one medium to another. Unfortunately, what users really want from an all-in-one messaging system they cannot have - at least not using current technology. While some format translations are simple and reliable, such as email-to-fax, or text-to-speech (if one doesn't mind the peculiar accents of speech synthesizers), others are more problematic. In other words, the ideal multimedia messaging system is not yet on the market.

And as if there weren't enough noise surrounding the integration of voice mail, fax machines and LAN-based email, along comes another new community - users who use the Internet for messaging. Lotus, Microsoft and Novell already support Web browsers such as Netscape Navigator, and the browsers get better at retrieving, playing and displaying multimedia message attachments, they will become popular for accessing multimedia mailboxes inside the organization as well.

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A more detailed discussion of the issues raised here
can be found in the print edition of this article.