Curator’s note: This is the second in a series of commentaries by Ralph Ehlers, discussing the early days of email implementation. This commentary describes his experience selling email to user communities. Seems hard to believe, but in the early days, this was hard. His observations on why managers typically resisted email are especially fascinating. When... read more »
Wikipedia, a generally reliable source, reckons that the first SMS text message was sent in 1992. This sounds about right. More specifically, Wikipedia says: SMS messaging was first used in December 1992, when Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old test engineer for Sema Group, used a personal computer to send the text message “Merry Christmas” via the Vodafone network to the... read more »
How and when did emoticons evolve? According to Microsoft’s Mike Smith, the first emoticon appeared in 1982. The smiley “:-)” and its opposite “:-(” were invented by Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon, who posted it to a bulletin board. Here’s what Scott said at the time. 19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :–) From: Scott E... read more »
Google+ is very impressive. I reckon Facebook is toast: The integration with other Google services will be a key strategic advantage, that Facebook will not be able to match. The Circles approach to privacy control is neat and puts control of sharing with the sender in a clean and easy to manage way. Widely aired... read more »
An Open Letter to Vendors Analyst giant Gartner is defending itself against an interesting lawsuit (see links at the end of this message). In a nutshell, ZL Technologies, an archiving firm, asserts that its low ranking on the Magic Quadrant is a result of never spending money with Gartner. Gartner denies that its reviews are... read more »
Google quietly announced the end of Google Wave on its blog earlier this week. The reason given was that adoption rates were too low. Just over a year ago we wrote about Google’s big splash around Google Wave. One of the things we pointed out at the time was Wave’s suitability for third-party developers to... read more »
A lot of Autonomy employees are very unhappy with the company. See these Glassdoor reviews, where employees share their experiences. Among other things, the culture appears to be one in which limited correlations between sales claims and reality are permissible. Caveat: Embittered ex-employees probably form the vast bulk of contributors to sites of this nature,... read more »
Last Friday (February 19), the chattering classes were gossiping about how cloud archiving vendor Smarsh had its Web site and phone lines down. Had the company suddenly gone down the toilet? Everything was in fact OK. The company’s Ken Anderson told us: We had technical issues this morning that created some intermittent access to some... read more »
In September 2004, Veritas Software purchased KVS for its email archiving product, Enterprise Vault. Veritas merged with Symantec, and thus the product is now Symantec’s Enterprise Vault, the market-leading archiving software. In this webcast, we discuss the Veritas/KVS acquisition with key individuals involved. Topics include KVS’s history, KVS’s motivations for being acquired, Veritas’ motivations for the acquisition, how the negotiations took place, the terms of the transaction, what went well, what was more difficult than anticipated, and lessons learned.... read more »
Google Wave was announced at the Google IO developers’ conference in late May 2009. Quick Summary: SaaS team workspace. To give you a general idea, think of a souped-up/Web 2.0 Wiki or bulletin board. My colleague Steve Kille aptly called it a “bulletin board on steroids” under the hood. Currently in an early state of... read more »
Please post interesting insights into this vendor’s business and products/services here. If you wish to post anonymously, please email david.ferris@ferris.com. Please identify yourself so that David can determine that the posting should be taken seriously. Alternatively, you can phone him on +1 415 367 3436. We’ll post your material, without identifying you.... read more »
We are about to achieve virtual immortality. Recently, Lazare Ponticelli, 110 years old, died. He was the last French infantryman left alive from the First World War. With him died the final traces of the rich and complex world of his comrades in the trenches, of his parents, and the vast majority of the stuff... read more »
David Ferris recently discovered there’s more to life than computers, and at the same time achieved immortality. See music video of Puppini Sisters. He’s the guy in the top hat and white scarf, about five seconds in, and at other crucial scenes in the unfolding drama. Shot at Greenwich Naval College, a lovely place, along... read more »
SC Magazine: Click Here for Story... read more »
We were saddened to learn recently that Henk Tobias died on July 4, 2005, in Barendrecht, Holland. He was 64. Henk was very active in the European EMA. At one time, he was chairman of the group. He ran very interesting user panels, where typically 20 to 50 messaging support staff would get together and... read more »
Over the last half of 2005, I’ve gradually become aware of a change in work styles: People are working harder than ever. There’s a greater level of frustration associated with the work. People have the sense of never being able to catch up. In part, this is due to the reviving economy in the United... read more »
Russian anti-spam vigilantes are a tough bunch. Not that we’d advocate this approach to reducing the global spam problem, but it’s a wonder that this hasn’t happened before. The Mosnews has the details: http://mosnews.com/news/2005/07/25/spammerdead.shtml. Author: Jeff Ubois, headline courtesy Nina…... read more »
In this one hour teleconference, email professionals from large organizations discuss what they have done to make their email systems Y2K compliant, what remains to be done, and the contingency plans developed in case problems arise.... read more »
We assess the economic cost of spam, focussing mainly on the waste of users’ time, the cost of technical support, and the cost of anti-spam technology.... read more »
Military forces throughout the world send email. They have a number of special requirements, focussed around reliability, accountability, delivery guarantees, and message integrity. Surprisingly, encryption is fairly low on the list. The main requirements are: Digital signatures, to identify senders, and ensure the message hasn’t changed... read more »
Ferris Research talking about online dating? Well, it’s communication. It’s collaboration. It incorporates email and often IM. Why not? Just a quick thought — it seems to me that the economic incentive for a dating website to provide a good service is broken. Most businesses thrive on repeat business, or a regular cashflow from a... read more »
To get an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the new Google Gmail, Ferris has been serving as a beta tester for the program. This research note presents our current analyses of the Google service.... read more »
This report gives a quick tutorial on Domino on the S/390, describes the strengths and weaknesses of the product, and overviews the key implementation issues.... read more »
This report looks at the extent to which X.400 ADMDs are used, and generally what the future outlook looks like for ADMDs.... read more »
The report starts with the main ways that email can, and usually does, improve corporate productivity. ... read more »
In this report, we first describe what KM is, illustrating the discussion with some high value applications. We consider product offerings by key KM vendors. ... read more »