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Comment by shaggyfrog | Hacker News Reader

"That’s why he hopes the company can eradicate internal emails in 18 months, forcing the company’s 74,000 employees to communicate with each other via instant messaging and a Facebook-style interface."

So, basically, let's eliminate the form of electronic communication that has some semblance of permanency (e-mail) and replace it with an ephemeral one (Facebook-style chat) and one that doesn't lend well to archiving, indexing and search (IM).

E-mail is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used wisely, or it can be used poorly. If it's being used poorly, why isn't the solution to fix how people are using it? And how the heck is 18% of the e-mail that reaches users spam? Do they not use filters?

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Why would it be hard to archive and index chats or IMs? My Facebook chats and IMs are already archived on Facebook. I even have a local archive in my iChat folder. Seems like that problem has been solved.

The article just means his company is shifting to something like Jive instead of Exchange.

Maintaining an internal mail system is a gigantic headache for many reasons. You have continual spam and phishing attacks from the outside as well as internal users using their email as a document repository. Closing off the external threat and using purpose built software for document exchange and internal communication is totally sensible.

There are all kinds of risks in letting Facebook handle the archiving of a company's internal communication, their bad track record with matters of data privacy notwithstanding.

I meant that a searchable Facebook style interface for archiving corporate communications isn't impossible, and already exists from at least one vendor. Not that a company should outsource their communication to Facebook.

the article says "Facebook-style", not "Facebook".

The post I'm replying to is specifically talking about saving Facebook chats.

Archive use of third party services like AIM or something is technically challenging for a variety of reasons, particularly as the industry continues its slow but steady march towards SSL usage. Products exist which can penetrate this encryption and log the network traffic directly (when I say "challenging" I mean just that, not impossible), translating it into logged IM entries (and yes, they do it by obtaining the keys from the services in question), but they are awfully pricy compared to just declaring that IM shall not be used, and there are enough protocols out there with enough usage that there's some frequent pain around losing logging with protocol updates. You can also host an IM server internally in which case logging is trivial, but many people aren't even aware that this is an option, or don't want to deal with IT to set it up and maintain it, or don't want to purchase the off-the-shelf products which can do it but are also more expensive (virtually by definition) than just declaring it shall not be done.

I used to work in this field. I do not recommend trying to break into it, there does not appear to be a market here.

I didn't mean the first thing you mentioned, more like the second. Mostly I meant that you can already buy enterprise social networking suites complete with instant messaging. My post must have been worded badly as it seems to have confused people. My comments about Facebook and IM were in response to a post that suggested there was some technical difficulty in archiving and searching IM and social networking style posts. Obviously, there is not, because Facebook already does it, and similar capability exists within iChat itself! It would not be difficult for a vendor to provide an integrated social network with IM to enterprises, and indeed, there are vendors which do just this.

I disagree that there is no market for this. Jive's S1 says they have 15M enterprise users spread out over 600+ companies.

Nah. I think the idea here is pretty good:

If something needs to be permanent, you should create a real document and publish it to a shared repository. That way knowledge, history and commentary is kept in a single place and not distributed throughout everyone's inboxes.

"Should" is the keyword here. Not that I disagree with you, but nobody is actually going to do this. Ever. Email is too easy to be replaced by document-creation procedures.

Also, email is great for showing record of communication. It's subject-based (except for the idiots who reply to an email with contents that have nothing to do with the subject) so it can be easily categorized and remembered. "Where was that email Rick sent? Oh yeah it was around the beginning of Nov, and the subject had 'wombats' in it." Sometimes you need a subject-based list of records.

I really think anything people end up "inventing" to replace email will wind up being the exact same thing as email, but with a less distributed architecture.

That shared repository is called SharePoint at many companies. Publishing documents to SharePoint often means that they will never be found again.

The majority of spam I see in corporate environments is "official". (read: from HR or whatever)

Sounds like that's a problem that could be fixed quite simply. Find out why HR is sending out so much stuff, and if there's a better way to do it or a way to eliminate it altogether. A short, once-a-day announcements e-mail should suffice, no?

The problem occurs when you have dozens of departments each wanting to make their short once-a-day announcement ;)

This is probably because the existence of their department is not entirely justifiable and they feel the need to make others aware of their presence and create the appearance of work being done.

Again, that sounds like a problem. Why so many announcements?

Facebook's chat has become a chat/messages/text/email hybrid so I can't see it being a bad replacement for email.

http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/

Tools. Exactly! That's the real issue that's at the heart of this. I'm no insider so I could be way off but I'm seeing either a company making a brash move sincerely but stupidly or there was some guy within the organization that thought this idea was so different that if implemented they could be considered cool and trendy like the younger startups and get some media attention from it.

Again, this is just my wild speculation but I got this funny feeling that this move was a chance for them to kill two birds with one stone. Solve a problem with a radical new solution while getting attention for it. I really don't think the media jumps all over company communication policies unless someone is spoon feeding them the story. I can just imagine some marketing guy writing a press released entitled "Hip Twch Firm Abandons Email, Paves the way for the Future of Communication".

Sillier things have happened.

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