Its Time for an Enterprise Collaboration 'Killer App'

Imagine the possibility of technology giants like Google coming up with a web based 'killer app' for medium-large enterprises that would integrate all or most of the tools used at the work place everyday. Starting with the mail client to collaboration and workflow tools, to maintaining time sheets. All it takes is consolidation of the various tools on the Web 1.0 & 2.0 landscape already offered by one company like Google. An online service provider such as Google has tools that address a variety of communication needs :

eMail
Calendar
Organizing of work flow and documents Groups/Communities
People Profiling and Social Networking
Blogs News and Updates syndication
Bookmarking
Pictures
Videos
Maps and Mashups
Mobile technology integration with online tools
...above all a highly accurate and nimble search function.

My belief is that, a shift to such a system could take place if it starts with the most basic of all the communication tools at the modern day work place - eMail. Once this is introduced all other tools could be grouped/offered around this which will kind of have a 'pull' mechanism to get people from within the organization to use them quickly. Managing a change that affects 1000 to 200000 people is an astronomical task
indeed. How did FaceBook get those millions of users to subscribe? Definitely not by
advertising. If an application introduced in the corporate environment is of
good value, people would adopt it with minimal push. After this point, it will
be a new revolution in the way people use their communication systems and the
way they view and contribute knowledge.
Why are we talking about such a change? No way, not another pains taking change! what might be the cost of this change and ultimately the cost of having the system running? How long might it take? etc. Well these are questions that I don't have answers to. But what I would like to say is that this could well be the future state of the corporate collaboration toolset.

Let's examine a few typical limitations of the current enterprise collaboration infrastructure used by many organizations:

• Disparate tools with different UI, platforms, dynamics and access points - Usually high cost of maintenance of various licenses
• eMail limitations - disk space given for emails is often too less(seldom crosses 100 MB), search within eMails is limited etc
• Doesn't make it easy for people to adapt to the new age tools (Web 2.0) as it will be seen as few more applications added to the already long list of Apps.
• Difficult to achieve 'Single Sign On' access to the various tools on the network
• Uptime issues with one or the other application - Many applications are slow

I am sure someone in those technology labs are brewing some great solutions to address these enterprise needs to belt out a "Killer App".