Communication business is moving fast forward. Traditional phone systems just won’t cut the deal for many of the companies out there today. Features like Presence and instant messaging are moving in to replace e-mails and missed phone calls. But what does it all mean?

Breaking the subject up a bit, I want to explain each element a little more in detail.

Presence status basically mean that your availability is updated based on your activity. Let’s say you have a meeting in your calendar. This could for example set your presence status to Busy – In a meeting. This could again result in an instant message instead of a missed call on your desk/mobile phone. Today most vendors even have mobile phone clients which are able to change your presence status. This means that you will be able to be online at any time anywhere.

There is both good and bad sides of this. We all need time to relax and enjoy our families and hobbies. And what about the concerned employee who feels they are under surveillance?

This is all concerns that need to be thought about when thinking a strategy on how presence will benefit your company in working faster and again in profit and growth.

Instant messaging has been here almost as long as the internet. Starting out with simple local clients evolving to worldwide spread clients like ICQ and Microsoft Messenger. Today most big Unified Communications vendors have their own clients to support this feature. Instant messaging when adapted correctly will eliminate 50% or more of our sent e-mails. Small mail correspondences with a single line will be gone, and days of waiting for a response from sent e-mails can be taken care of right away.

We all need to start thinking communications in different ways. How can we make sure that we get the help or response when we need it?

Does this mean that e-mails will die?

E-mail will be here for a long time. But we will use it less and less in our everyday. Who knows, maybe it will replace normal letters or snail mail as some people call it.

But what about the desk phone will that go away as well?

Well we evolved the desk phone over the last decades going from analog to digital and now they are mostly IP phones. However with all the green IT talks and how we need to protect the environment, this is will be replaced with a softphone on the computer. One client that hosts all the features we need. One single client on your computer to do instant messaging or IM, phone calls, changing your presence and do conferences with one or more participants.

We will always be communicating. But the development will never stop. As long as every company has a valid strategy that will keep them on track with technology, we will all benefit from the evolution.