• About the speaker
• About the ACS
• Introduction
• Not sinking under a flood of e-mail
• What messages haven't been delivered?
• Discussions, not messages
• Keep as long as necessary
• Make e-mail "normal"
• See also

• E-mail is the poor cousin of the electronic document world
• The world will be run in 1997 by plain text e-mail
• How do we create, transmit, store and find e-mail messages?

• The 'net will dominate business communications within a few months
• I do most of my business on-line now:
  • Text e-mail has replaced most telephone calls, faxes and meetings.
  • Junk e-mail and volume is not a problem
  • Simple work-flow functions are is needed to supplement e-mail software

• E-mail systems are for message management, not task or document management
• Conformation of non-delivery is needed

• E-mail creates discussions on topics
• Correspondence tracking systems only handle replies to correspondence
• Document management systems need to mark threads of discussion for retention

• All these issues have been discussed at length in government:
  • Improving Electronic Document Management: Guidelines for Australian Government Agencies
  • Architecture For Access To Government Information
• Meanwhile the Internet has grown into the public infrastructure for electronic documents
• The industry needs to supply a way to store these documents

• Think of e-mail as the normal way you communicate and do business
• Get the document management tools ready to deal with it

• Text of talk
• Three months on the InfoBahn looking for the on-line future
• Other talks by the ACS President
• ACS Home Page
• Tom Worthington's Home Page