How can I use channels to better manage email? If a greater percentage of content (that should be persisted as knowledge artifacts) flowed through a medium where pub-sub dynamics were at play, the mail volume would naturally decrease. I can’t even get my group to document in anything except e-mail. This is an excellent point. Andy and I have already begun to see dramatic drops in e-mail correspondence to run our business. But, we’re very early adopters, and very biased. The bigger issue – the emergence of more ways to move content into channels, as well as more refined approaches for consuming them – will have a big impact on late and laggard adopters. A prominent CEO recently told me: "I'm continuing my on-going quest to figure out the right way to process in-bound information from a variety of sources ... for low-volume channels with high-impact information, I'd like it smack in my field of vision, without having to switch to another [application] or folder." I see this as additional evidence that any tilt away from e-mail will always have its exceptions, and I might also offer that there are other alternatives for low-incidence, high-importance items besides ad-hoc systems like the Web. Text-messaging on a GSM phone, or instant messaging are a few examples. But if that class of information truly needs to be in your field of vision, it had better be in a very agile form such that it can leveraged by the application that happens to be in front of you when you need it. NewsGator (an integrated tool for Outlook) represents a model where you can publish and subscribe to channels without fundamentally changing the working model of e-mail. Almost everything I read (from a channel) comes to me through Newsgator, and about 20% of what I write in channels is written in an Outlook form (through NewsGator). I think this ratio will increase to perhaps 40 to 60%. It will never reach 100% because there are so many places where channel items can be composed (e-mail, cell-phones, Word, voice). Channel authoring and RSS consumption models will be successful at the moment you realize that you are fundamentally not required to do anything different than you already do. ;-) | 
