Deva: People have long been predicting the demise of email, but the fact remains that it is the most effective communication vehicle for many purposes. There is always the trusty telephone and voicemail, but they take more time, require more coordination between parties to communicate and are one-to-one in nature.

Instant messaging and texting are both great for quick communications, but they require both parties to be available and are very transient in nature, plus instant messaging can be quite distracting.

Wikis, Groove, Sharepoint and other collaboration tools are great for certain types of projects, but the overhead required for them makes them less suitable for more ad-hoc type communications.

Having said all that, email definitely needs some help to remain a highly effective communications mechanism. I predict companies will be forced to put in place more concrete email usage policies and procedures as well as implement software for email processing automation.

At ClearContext, we address a number of these issues by automatically prioritizing and organizing email and providing functionality to help users then take action on emails more quickly, such as automatically creating linked tasks, appointments and follow-ups. I predict more and more tools of this nature will make their way into corporations as the sheer volume of email requiring action continues to increase.

David: Do you think most of the Outlook 2007 benefits will be user interface related, or are there deeper, feature benefits?

Deva: For end users of Outlook 2007, besides the improved Search capabilities, I believe most of the benefits will be UI related. However, users will benefit from enhanced APIs and other improvements that will enable software vendors and IT departments to build more advanced tools integrating with Outlook.

David: An API is the Application Programming Interface that determines how add-on developers access the internals of the program. From your perspective as an add-on developer, how have the Outlook APIs changed?

Deva: Outlook 2007 is now a real development platform, as Microsoft has definitely recognized the fact that Outlook has, for many users, become the place where they live and [has also recognized] the importance of building on that platform. Many more APIs have been opened up to allow direct access to Outlook data and objects. This includes both data access and UI elements, leading to more tightly integrated applications within and alongside Outlook 2007.

David: What do you think of Outlook and SharePoint and how they might be linked?

Deva: Outlook 2007 provides direct access to SharePoint, allowing information to be pushed between the two systems. Corporate IT groups will now be able to build bridges between the ad-hoc communications that go on within email systems and the more structured projects that are created and managed within SharePoint sites. With Outlook 2007, I see this flow from ad-hoc emails to managed projects in SharePoint becoming much more common.