Message Nirvana? Why Not?
In a previous post, I talked about milestones and their literal role reassuring travelers that the proper path is being followed, and to indicate either distance traveled or the remaining distance to a destination. In this post, I'd like to continue that theme and discuss our most recent milestone: M+Archive 2009.1.
Messaging Architects has always been about open standards, file format neutrality, and application independence. This is one of the design principals of the M+Platform. The new release of M+Archive simply continues this direction and achieves the milestone of fully transparent message co-location.
We recognize the reality many organizations use multiple email systems, or are investigating migration. Mailbox and message co-location is MA's open approach, and far, far better than migration.
It's also no easy accomplishment. As opposed to format transcoding, letting messages live in multiple locations at any given time is a real engineering challenge! For now, our focus has been to figure out how to let GroupWise and Exchange coexist, but Notes, Sendmail, Gmail, and others are also potential options. It all really depends on what our customers need the most.
Where are we going with this? What other milestones might be down the road? This list will probably inspire more than a few sleepless nights among my Product Managers, but here are a few things we'll probably start to work on in the coming months/years:
- Moving messages and appointments transparently from application to application (Exchange to GroupWise to Notes to Sendmail to ... ).
- Allowing these messages to move from on-premise to off (i.e., supporting private clouds, both on premise or off, and public ASP clouds from the likes of Google & Amazon).
- Conversion to/from dynamic states (live messages and attachments) to static states (archived messages and fixed content/attachment stores with both point-in-time view and recovery).
- Letting message items morph from message to appointment to task, across different messaging systems.
I'm not sure in what order these will occur — or even if they will all occur — but I can make a strong business case for each of them.
Today co-habitation is a process that involves smart agents and some heavy lifting from our pro-services team to configure the stack the right way. Eventually this will shift to intelligent message queues (pre-processors) that add meta-data to messages directly at the gateway, or as we extract and archive. This will enable our vision of boundary-less messaging and collaboration across the most important open protocols (SMTP, CalDAV, CardDav, GroupDAV) and many of the proprietary closed ones such as MAPI. This transparency will be achieved via open format translators that know how to move messages around while maintaining the meta-data as part of the message body, and our intelligent agents will understand how to process the content according to organizational policies and roles.
The message system co-habitation we are delivering in M+Archive 2009.1 is just the first step of a rather long journey, with many significant future milestones, to a destination we may never fully reach. But, we'll be making sure you enjoy the ride.
– Pierre Chamberland
Pierre Chamberland is the Chief Energizing Officer at Messaging Architects.
