As I noted last week, Parlano, Inc. released a new White Paper entitled Moving Beyond the Inbox: Persistent Group Chat – An Approach for More Profitable Team Communications. Jeff Schultz, the SVP of Worldwide Marketing at Parlano said that he is “anxious for feedback.” Okay already, you don’t have to ask twice 😉

Note that I have written previously about Parlano, both here and at Shared Spaces. I really like what they offer.
Shared Spaces, Response to the Parlano White Paper, “Next Generation Communications: The Value of Enterprise Instant Messaging”, August 10, 2004
Shared Spaces, Notes from Parlano and Wainhouse Webinar, January 20, 2005
Shared Spaces, Parlano Mobile is Coming 2Q2006, March 31, 2006
Michael’s Thoughts, Briefing Notes on MindAlign and MindAlign Mobile, March 1, 2007

The core thesis of the paper is that email, IM, blogs and wikis have their place in business communications today, but something else is needed to pull all of that communication together. The paper asserts that Parlano’s persistent chat solution is the answer de jour.

My feedback and analysis based on reading the paper, therefore, is as follows:

1. A unifying client like Parlano’s MindAlign is indeed one way of adding an activity-oriented layer across other tools (p.5, p.9). It isn’t the only one, and vendors of alternative tools could probably make a case for why their offerings perform a similar unification role. The key point is that a team should have one technology that becomes the central place for coordination and communication; scattering it across multiple tools is counter-productive and productivity-diminishing.
2. I think it is too simplistic to argue, on the one hand, that because email users must wade through messages of questionable value, that merely pre-organizing messages into an orderly collection of channels will resolve the issue (eg, bottom of p.6). People will still have to go through the history of what was said, and some of those contributions will be of questionable value too. The change in tool may force people to speak more to the point and increase their communications clarity, but it equally may not. As I’ve said before, you can’t base technology decisions on the assumption of perfect usage.
3. Just because organizations may not archive email and IM messages today, there is technology available to make that happen — eg, Quest’s Archive Manager for email, others for IM (p.6). *If* email and IM are archived and made “full-text searchable by the current and future members of a group”, then Parlano’s value differentiation is reduced.
4. The argument in this paper for “what’s beyond the inbox? … a combination of [many technologies” is similar to the arguments I put forward in my August 2004 paper on Collaboration Software Clients. I haven’t written Part 2 yet, but I still believe that the best attributes of the various tools need to be re-integrated into a new universal / unified client.
5. Why does the text on p.11 speak to “cross-functional conversations” and yet the image of the MindAlign client show those conversations organized by functional unit? Surely if they were cross-functional and activity-centric, the activity would be the organizing item?
6. From p.6, “Persistent group chat lets organizations deploy thousands of business-class discussions” … yes, indeed it does. But what’s the difference between “thousands” of Notes applications, or “thousands” of SharePoint sites? From an information management perspective, if we’re talking that quantity, the pre-deployment planning for what should be a separate channel and what should be done in a higher-order challenge is a key question. The balance between freedom to create and preventing information chaos is essential to get right.

So … in summary, a good contribution from Parlano. Not withstanding my critique above, I strongly encourage organizations to trial what Parlano has to offer, and notice what happens.

Did you read it? What’s your take?