Messaging in the Millennium: What Will It All Mean?

by Michele Rubenstein, U.S. Department of the Treasury

In the last decade we have come from not knowing what messaging is (it barely existed in 1987) to messaging becoming a strategic and mission critical necessity. Messaging used to mean simply e-mail. Now it means so much more than plain e-mail. Messaging has truly become an infrastructure upon which untold applications can be built. If you stop and think about it, messaging is really older than ten years. It was over 150 years ago that Samuel Morse sent his first message over a telegraph line, 'What hath God wrought?' Interesting question.

In the real estate world they say that the buzzwords are 'location, location, location.'

Well, in this global society of ours today that translates to 'communication, communication, communication.' And, how better to do that today than by electronic messaging. After all, it is one of the least expensive ways of communicating today.

There are those who say messaging has gone about as far as it needs to go. But don't you believe that! We still need greater standards compliance, more tightly integrated feature sets, and greater interoperability. Internet mail, otherwise known as SMTP mail, still needs some maturity in order to provide business quality messaging. And X.400 is not dead. When it comes to business quality messaging, X.400 is the preferred way to go. This was borne out in a survey EMA conducted last summer where 74% of the respondents indicated a preference for X.400 messaging in order to achieve that business quality grade.

So, what to look forward to from here? Some of the things I see include my belief that:

1. Electronic messaging will continue to grow at phenomenal rates, as will the Internet.

2. Security as an issue will never die. Digital signatures will become more prevalent.

3. Messaging will become more sophisticated, and as such will become more of a business tool.

4. Messaging management will become more important.

5. Groupware, or collaborative computing will be the next real infrastructure built on the messaging infrastructure.

Where I work we experienced a 900% growth in messaging traffic in a 90-day period within the first year of production service of our messaging backbone. For large companies, that is not unusual. Think of it. Allowing for the standard deviation of personal use, that is a lot of 'business' use. Five years ago if an MTA or mail server went down, the technical crew might get a call or two from users wondering what went wrong. These days if that happens, at least where I work, people call screaming and pitching fits about the lost work and business costs of not having the messaging system up and running.

What that means is that you must plan for growth using extensible systems. You have to know your own requirements as well as those of your business partners. Oh, and you need to forecast who your future business partners are going to be if you want to survive. This scenario will not change in the foreseeable future. It will get worse. Messaging can no longer afford to be an unfunded initiative. That means people need to look at messaging as a pure business tool and thus, make a business case for it's utilization.

It's no joke that security will never die. No matter how tightly we design servers and clients, as long as they connect to each other we will have a security 'problem.' Additionally, as long as there are people who wish to wreak havoc on messaging systems, we will have a security 'problem.' If we build the systems stronger, the trouble makers simply become more sophisticated. It is interesting how the Internet, with which is currently being used for purposes for which it was never intended to be used for (educational and Defense work), is becoming more feature rich as the months go by. Alternately, X.400 was designed in part to provide the feature richness that the Internet mail lacked. Now they are becoming more and more alike.

As Internet and messaging use continue to grow and become stronger business requirements for businesses of all kinds, the perception that the Internet is 'free' will continue to grow and people will continue to jump to it in droves. The Internet is not free. Those of us who are realists or who have budgets to manage, know this. Interestingly enough, some large Fortune 500 companies find X.400 costs to be the same or cheaper than Internet use costs.

So with that said, as people continue to try to use the Internet for business use, they develop an expectation based on business requirements that transactions and messages traversing the Internet should be secured in some way. Furthermore, there is also an expectation that authentication and non repudiation requirements be met. This is where digital signature use comes into the picture. Of course digital signatures themselves require an infrastructure (Public Key Infrastructure, or PKI), but they do offer to fulfill the non repudiation requirement. I believe that the use of digital signatures will grow phenomenally over the next five years. The development of smart card technology that can carry more than one set of keys is growing and becoming more available. Digital signatures are in use for many government applications. Their use in the world of electronic commerce and other forms of messaging will greatly enhance the use of this technology.

I strongly believe that the technology to solve these problems exists today. The issue is with integration of the technologies with existing infrastructures. Also, the expertise to do the integration falls short in today's experience pool. This will improve in the next five years.

Messaging will become more sophisticated, and as such will become more of a business tool. IMAP4 and POP3 are currently deployed. Obviously POP3 has a greater presence and support base, but IMAP4 is a great improvement and many messaging vendors presently do or in the near future will support it. These two technologies are fast surpassing proprietary messaging solutions in deployment today. This will continue to grow. In this day and age of telecommuters, remote offices, frequent travelers, and mobile workers, there is a need to be able to support their messaging requirements. And with mobility being a key word (no pun intended) security is a requirement.

As the use of messaging grows for e-mail, electronic commerce and other applications, the need for some kind of directory services will become a mission critical requirement. Not only are directories necessary for white pages type of information (such as names, addresses, titles, e-mail addresses and the like), directories also provide a repository for digital keys (X.509). Directory services is in its infancy now. In the next five years we will see their use grow exponentially. Whether these directory services are name-based or not, they will grow. I do believe, however, that it is the use of X.500 and X.509 which will lead the charge. And this will be driven by the use of electronic commerce.

Electronic messaging is not simply the basis for basic communication. It is the infrastructure upon which and through which we communicate our mission critical business needs. We send text messages, multimedia messages, attachments, invoices, payments, requests for services and proposals¥all these things are sent in or with messages. We all use different and disparate systems in heterogeneous networks. We have a messaging management nightmare!

I have taught tutorials on messaging management for several years now, and I can tell you there never is a clean way to manage a messaging infrastructure. Most large organizations (of a couple hundred persons or more) have more than one messaging solution. Now, there can be 'official, corporate' solutions. But, there is always that small group or that sizable renegade group that implements their own solution, different from the corporate solution. More often the case, though, you find large organizations such as mine who have multiple messaging solutions running through a corporate messaging backbone. And thus, you have the management nightmare of managing all these different systems and also supporting connectivity to other outside systems (whether through direct connection, private network or via the Internet).

There are few tools today that will allow the management of truly heterogeneous messaging infrastructures. There are plenty of vendor specific tools. But let's face it. Not many of us have single vendor solutions today. I believe this will improve greatly in the next five years. As timely standards compliance is met by more and more vendors, and as users scream louder and louder for these management tools, we will see vendors put useable product on the market.

Groupware has been a buzzword for a while now. With all the technology and sophistication of messaging today, groupware should be more of a collaborative and interoperable tool. But it isn't. We have several vendor specific groupware solutions on the market, but they do not integrate well, if at all. This is unfortunate because some vendor specific solutions are great automation tools that aid productivity. The leaders will rise to the top of the heap and, just as they did for e-mail, realizing that users really want interoperability and choice. The vendors that do not do this will lose market share.

Well, there you have some of what I see coming down the millennium pike. I am sure there will be more as new technologies and capabilities emerge. The only sure thing in this business, in my opinion, is that the level of automation and sophistication will continue to increase. Security will get better. And we will do more and more electronically. We will sign less and less with pens and more and more with digital signatures. We will see more management tools emerge. Collaborative computing will increase. And we will spend more money trying to implement these solutions. But, the good news is that these solutions will improve business.

Messaging Magazine invited Michele Rubenstein to give readers a preview of messaging issues in the new millennium that will be explored at EMA'98, April 28-30, 1998 in Anaheim, California. Michele and Gary Rowe serve as co-chairs of EMA'98--Messaging in the Millennium.