2. E-mail -- just one of the many communications streams in the workplace -- will become part of a "puddle," or "activity thread."

Although e-mail seems unlikely to be supplanted by alternatives, the job of the IT manager is nevertheless complicated by the emergence of other options.

E-mail is in its "pimply adolescence," says futurist Paul Saffo at the Institute for the Future. The problems of spam, phishing and e-mail-borne malware will be conquered, he predicts. In the meantime, he cautions, "you can't treat e-mail in isolation. All of our communications forms are melting away, and we are creating new things out of the puddle of old stuff."

Richard Golden, vice president for IT infrastructure at Circuit City Stores, says these threats will cause corporations to augment their technology defenses with strong policy defenses. He says it's relatively easy to protect e-mail systems with spam filters, virus scanners and the like because the systems are well defined, with discrete messages going from Point A to Point B through corporate IT assets.

"But things are converging into a world that is not as clearly definable as a corporate e-mail system," he says. "I think you'll see more policies about things like blogging, for instance. As the lines blur on the means for communications, it's going to require more focus on the information conveyed, regardless of the means used to convey it."

IBM Research is looking for ways to combine e-mail with other functions and integrate it seamlessly into users' daily activities. "It's not enough to help people manage their e-mail; it's important to help them manage their work," says Dan Gruen, a research scientist at the company's facility. That involves "connecting all the communications and information feeds around a topic or activity," he says.

For example, an IBM Research proto-type called Activity Explorer is a collaboration tool that pulls together e-mail messages, synchronous communication such as instant messages, screen images, files, folders and to-do lists. A project team can establish "activity threads" containing these feeds and can switch easily between asynchronous and real-time collaboration. An activity thread might include the messages, chats and files exchanged among members of a team that's writing a contract bid, for instance.

A more advanced experimental tool from IBM called Unified Activity Manager does all that and more, linking into other corporate applications such as workflow systems. It not only combines the elements of a current activity but also pulls in those elements from past similar activities. These notions of "activity-centric collaboration" will show up in the next release of Lotus Notes, dubbed Hannover, which is expected to ship next year, Gruen says.

Meanwhile, Microsoft Research has developed a way to combine e-mail, files, Web pages, calendar entries, to-do lists and other materials into one searchable archive. Called "Stuff I've Seen," the prototype uses MS Search to index a user's important content and then offers it through a unified interface with sorting, filtering, previews and thumbnail views.

3. New e-mail applications will emerge, including tools that mine message archives for corporate intelligence.

Even as e-mail yields turf to upstarts like IM, especially among younger users, new uses for e-mail are on the horizon. As companies and individuals begin to systematically archive messages, the e-mail becomes available for data mining, and researchers at a number of companies and universities are developing ways to make these archives more accessible.

For example, Hewlett-Packard researcher Bernardo Huberman is devising ways to "harvest organizational knowledge" by mining the e-mail messages and PowerPoint presentations of employees. His techniques go way beyond the searching and categorization of messages that products do pretty well now. Huberman looks at the strengths of communication bonds among employees and patterns of communication that can reveal both hidden problems and opportunities.

"You can look at an organizational chart and make all sorts of inferences about how people work, but when you look at e-mail patterns, you see how they work in a different way," he says. "You discover leadership roles, such as who's the hub through which most of the e-mails go, that you wouldn't identify from the organizational chart."