The innovation of email was one of those pivotal moments in technology history that changed everything.  The same, I believe, is happening today with social media technologies, possibly to a larger degree.  The integration of email in any good business collaboration platform is important for a very good reason; today’s businesses use email every day.  So, for people to embrace a new technology, it has to work with email. 

Features like publishing content to a page by writing an email are critical in the adoption phase.  Uploading files by simply attaching them to an email is another critical feature.   Emailing pages out to other people and notification by email are also important. 

The other technology that businesses use, surprisingly, is fax.  Maybe some day we can look back and say, “remember those days when we used fax things…” but today it is a technology that still endures in everyday business and so it should be integrated.  One feature we’ve developed is the ability to fax a document or send a voice mail to CoActLive.  The files get converted to PDF and MP3 respectively and go into a queue where a user can then store them in the appropriate application or page.  For contracts, this works very well.  A real estate broker or lawyer can quite easily manage such documents and organize them by client by simply creating client pages and attaching files to them.

These features are all very important to help smooth the adoption of new technologies in the enterprise and help people embrace them as well as they have embraced email.