Email was the first collaboration tool in the Intarnet. Then intranet portals emerged, and they wanted to kill Email because of its lacks: instead of sending back and forth messages and documents, they are placed on a portal web-page (for example, in the news, on the forum or file cabinet). But due to the fact that people got used to e-mail and email was also used for external communications - intranet portals failed to replace the Email as a primary workspace. Moreover, recently Email launched the counterattack. And it happened because the major enterprise Email-solutions (GMail, Outlook, Lotus Notes) have become the platforms that allow third-party developers to add new functionality.

Attention - is more precious resource than time. And e-mail - is a black hole, which draws your attention. While spending just a few minutes to check your inbox, you can spend a lot of (units) of attention - tire your brain and significantly reduce its efficiency (especially if you use to check your email every half an hour). Until now, GMail users had some advantage in this issue. GMail provides, perhaps the world's best spam filter. Besides, tags, stars, customizable filters, discussion threads help to make the mailbox more clear. But nowadays, when an average office worker receives 110 emails per day - it's not enough. That is why the GMail developers came up with the new revolutionary GMail feature - Priority Inbox .

Few days ago the analytical company Frost & Sullivan stated that Google will soon storm the unified communications market, which is dominated by Cisco, Avaya and Microsoft. After all, Google has GMail, Google Voice, GTalk, Buzz, Gizmo5, Android, GISP and it remains just to combine all these technologies into single offering. And Google has decided to immediately confirm this forecast - from today GMail allows you to make and receive phone calls (thanks to the integration with Google Voice and Gizmo5). Meanwhile the VoIP service in GMail is available only in US.

At last Google (aka Search giant) has decided to make the search in Google Apps more convenient. We can't say that until now it was bad, but if you wanted to find an email - you had to open GMail, if you wanted to find a document - you opened Google Docs, etc. Thus, to get a full view about any client or task you had to collect data from various sources. Now GMail has added a new feature called Google Apps Search that allows to the search for documents from Google Docs and pages from Google Sites right inside your inbox (you can activate this feature in the GMail Labs). Unfortunately, this search does not include results from Google Calendar and Google Notebook. Unlike Google, Zoho was more fundamental in online office search. Early this summer it released Zoho Search, which is a separate service (like google.com) that can search in all major Zoho apps. As you can see, Zoho prefers to create new services, and Google is positioning GMail, as the primary user interface for all Google Apps applications.

Today, Google has rolled out the new GMail version and it's major upgrade is the fully redesigned Google Contacts section. Now the main GMail menu consists of 3 main items: Mail, Contacts and Tasks. And while the Tasks module is still like a toy, the Google Contacts has been remaked into a grown-up contact manager with interface, similar to Gmail (which has already proved its usability). You can now assign tags to contacts, like to emails. The contact page now includes the large Notes field that is convenient to log the most important points in relationships with a person. You can also see all email conversations with this person. Besides now you can edit the contact data without switching to the edit mode (like before). But the most interesting - is not the external redesign. It turned out that Google Contacts has its own product manager - Benjamin Grol, and when he represented the new features, he noted that Google is thinking about turning Contacts into a better CRM solution.

As you know, Google services are popular both for business and for personal use. That is why, many users often have a need to switch from working to personal account (for example, to check mail). This required multiple logout/login procedures. But now this process will be much more easier - Google is rolling out multi-account sign-in that allows to switch between accounts using the top menu. You can activate this feature and add accounts on this page. However, switching between accounts will work not for all services - only for GMail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Sites, Google Voice, App Engine and Google Code. In addition, those who activate multi-account sign-in - would have to to give up the offline features in Gmail and Calendar. Recall that soon another related problem will be solved soon - some personal services (Google Reader, Blogger, Youtube ...) will become available in Google Apps accounts.

Rapportive - is a plug-in for GMail (or more exactly - for browser) which in the GMail's right pane instead of ads shows the social profile of the person who sent you the email. The information for the profile is collected automatically (searched by email-address) from the most popular social networks and public services (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, etc.). Thus, you can see the latest actual information about the person - his photo, contacts, interests, recent messages, current location. You can add personal notes to the profile. It supports Firefox, Chrome and Safari. This plugin can turn GMail in something like a Social CRM - the useful tool for communications with customers. Of course, Rapportive - it's not super innovative service. We already wrote about Xobni, Gist and Outlook Social Connector, which also display social profiles in email clients. However, yesterday Rapportive raised over $1 Million from Gmail creator Paul Buchheit and some other ventures.

Almost a year ago GMail has become a full-fledged email-service for virtual businesses when it enabled users to send messages from GMail through any SMTP server, i.e. from any email-address (for example, now in your personal GMail inbox you can respond to customer emails and the customer will receive your answer from the corporate domain). However, one little issue prevented this feature of becoming usable - you could create only one signature for all email-accounts. And only a year later that issue was resolved. Now, you can create a separate signature for each email-account in GMail. Moreover, now you can format the signature in WYSIWYG-editor, add links and images to it. Sure that this feature will make Internet entrepreneurs happy.

Socialwok (known as the "social layer for Google Apps") like the online organizer Producteev, shows us the new meaning of "cross-platform" definition. Realizing that users most of time spend in email clients (such as Outlook and GMail), Socialwok simply decided to get inside these email clients. Socialwok was one of the first services to use the new GMail API and has created the gadget that can be expanded on the entire GMail workspace (see screenshot) and allows to post messages to microblogs, share Google Docs files, images, Youtube videos and events from Google Calendar, search for Google Docs, post to Twitter or Facebook right from your GMail interface.

In addition to the business version of GAE and cloud storage GS, at the I/O conference Google introduced for developers the new APIs for GMail and Google Buzz. New GMail API allows developers to embed applications directly to emails (as gadgets). These gadgets are currently only available for GMail in Google Apps, and may be added by account administrator from Google Apps Marketplace. For example, Gist and Xobni gadgets display person social information at the bottom of email (as they do it in MS Outlook and Lotus Notes). The Manymoon gadget allows to quickly create a task or project from the email. Taking into account that virtually all enterprise collaborative and social tools use email for notifications, we can expect an avalanche of new GMail gadgets, as well as increasing popularity of this email service in the enterprise segment.

So, iPad is now available in US and like Avatar is breaking all records (already about 400 thousand devices are sold). The first users have already downloaded several millions iPad applications, but most of them are consumer apps, rather than business applications. As we noted earlier, iPad has a little chance to become a revolutionary business tool. And not just because of the lack of webcam, multitasking, Flash support and security measures. Despite its originality, iPad will compete in the corporate market with an army of netbooks and smartphones (including iPhone). But certainly iPad will be useful for business of software vendors, which have already begun to announce iPad clients to get the customer attention.

The same day, when Microsoft released Exchange 2010, its competitor, Cisco, impressed the IT world with numerous product introductions across all categories of its collaboration portfolio. The company unveiled the enhanced unified communication system, three new intranet and social software solutions. But the most significant new product is Cisco WebEx Mail that will compete with MS Exchange. It integrates some of the technology Cisco acquired when it purchased PostPath in 2008 and Webex Mail service. The mail difference from Exchange is that it's the SaaS solution. Users can access their mail and calendar through browser web interface or sync it with their mobile client (Blackberry, iPhone, ActiveSync). As for the desktop client, Cisco Webex Mail is intended to use MS Outlook. The developers boast of the complete integration with Outlook, including email, calendar, notes and shared folders.

When early this year IBM released their new SaaS platform, LotusLive, they promised to add Email to its suite. Today this promise is realized: the brand new SaaS email service LotusLive iNotes is available for business-users. IBM pushes it as a new alternative to Google Apps. Why Google Apps, but not GMail? Because, except the email tools, iNotes contains calendar and contact manager. IBM reps say that Google can't understand the difference between consumer web-services and business apps, and IBM has a vast experience in creating and supporting complex enterprise systems. So, it's just a question of time, when iNotes will drive away Google Apps users, moreover it costs only $36/user/year against Google's $50.