When I wrote a posting about Unified Communications (see What is Unified Communication?) I thought I’d pretty much scoped out the area. A recent briefing with DimDim made me think again. DimDim offers a free (to individual users and small business) Webex-like collaboration service, and has been doing so since the start of the year when DimDIm emerged from bet test. However, the DimDim service is evolving in a distinctly different way to how Webex evolved.

Webex built its service for specific types of collaborative activity; webinars, sales demonstrations, remote support and so on. It probably needed to do so to get users to understand how to use the various capabilities it offered. DD Ganguly, CEO of DimDim maintains that the world is now moving on – to the development of Unified Collaboration, and I’m inclined to agree with him.

The Dim Dim analyst presentation includes the graphic illustrated here, which sums up the idea. The fact is that many jobs are fundamentally collaborative or contain a fair amount of collaborative activity.For those activities, what needs to be provided is a working environment which provides all possible collaborative capability, which naturally includes all of unified communications (email, chat, mobile, VoIP, presence, etc.) but also collaborative working activity like use of video cameras, desktop sharing and particularly document sharing (where a document is anything created by software).

This is not a complicated idea, even though it’s technical implementation is. It’s about being able to switch your PC or desktop into becoming a collaborative environment whenever you need to, and quickly. This helps with collaboration in both a practical way, because you have a way to integrate collaborative activity with other activity and a psychological way, because you no longer think in terms of scheduling collaboration, you just collaborate as the need arises.

An important fact here is that DimDim is either a no costs service or a low cost service (it starts at $99/month for unlimited use by 20 concurrent users). It makes it possible for DimDim’s use to become integrated and pervasive.

An important point to get to grips with is that the world of communications has been completely unintegrated with the world of computing from the getgo. It’s a huge disconnect. We work on computers and we communicate and the two activities are distinct. The first step to sanity was the Internet, which put computers on a “telephone network of computers” paving the way for the IP address and the telephone number (the telephone’s address) to be the same.

Although there was much talk about the next step, Computer Integrated Telephony (CIT), most of what emerged from it was computers able to dial a number for you (not exactly stunning in business benefit) and Call Centers (which did deliver considerable business benefit). This was connection of the two world rather than their true integration.

The third step, true integration, is taking places with Unified communications, CEBP and now, also Unified Collaboration. It’s not here yet, but it’s coming down the track. With true integration all aspects of communication become services available to the user “with a single click.”