There are two major communication paradigms in the enterprise. These are synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous communication is typified by chat. Asynchronous communication is typified by email.

In synchronous communications both (or all) parties need to be present at the same time to be effective. Asynchronous communications are designed around both (or all parties) not needing to be present at the same time to be effective.

Historically, most electronic communication within an enterprise was conducted using email (an asynchronous communication tool). Even communication that was better done synchronously was done within email.

This had two major downsides. Firstly, email is not well designed for synchronous communications. For example, one has to create a subject and type in a users name instead of just clicking on a user and typing. The second downside of this, is that this contributed to the much dreaded email-overload problem.

There has been a trend lately of moving synchronous communication to chat tools such as Slack, HipChat, Skype and even personal chat tools like Text Messaging, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger etc.

However, the need for asynchronous communication does not go away. Sometimes multiple parties cannot be present at the same time. Sometimes replying requires some contemplation. Sometimes a party is present but busy. Sometimes parties need to execute a long-running process.

Just like email is ill-suited to synchronous communications, chat tools are ill-suited to asynchronous communications. They are poor at triage and enabling follow-up. They are also poor at supporting concurrent long-running processes.

So, the result now is that enterprise communication has been balkanized into two silos.

TMail21 solves this issue by giving every TMail (analogous to an email thread) its own unique friendly tracking number. Thus TMail21 is a Tracked Mail system. This tracking number can be placed directly into the chat stream.

If during a chat, an asynchronous process needs to be launched, this can be launched within TMail and the tracking number placed into the chat stream. Alternatively the parties can refer to a TMail at any time during the chat.

In this way TMail bridges the world of synchronous and asynchronous communications. Chat streams benefit by being able to offload asynchronous communications onto TMail but still being able to track them from the Chat. TMail benefits from the reduction in the ‘Message-overload’ problem.

Together they can power a massive increase in enterprise productivity. Here is a brief one minute video that describes the power of a tracking number coupled with your mail.

TMail also has many other techniques to massively increase enterprise productivity such as Smart Sections, Lucid Threads, Support for Processes, Certified Mail etc.

You can get started with TMail21 for free by clicking here.