Despite competition from social media and other messaging applications, email continues to grow as a communication platform. The Radicatti Group forecasts global email volume for businesses will grow from about 109 billion messages per day in 2014 to 139 billion in 2018. Email continues to evolve with more integration options for popular social media apps like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, extending its value across a growing number of channels. And then there is the cloud.

In many ways, consumer-focused webmail from the late 1990's (remember RocketMail and Hotmail?) were some of the earliest form of cloud services. Today, cloud services are maturing rapidly and user adoption is gaining significant traction following the path set by the smartphone and mobile app markets. For business applications, email and other productivity apps like word processing, presentation and spreadsheet apps are migrating to the cloud, providing easier access and a new path of innovation through third party add-ons. Google Apps for Work and Microsoft Office 365 are leading the way in this category and this market segment is poised for massive growth.

Gartner has made several estimates and forecasts with regard to the growth of cloud-based applications, including these examples, sourced from BetterCloud.com :

  • "50 million business people provisioned in whole or part with cloud office systems capabilities at the start of 2013. … [representing only] 8% of the overall universe of office system users."
  • "In the enterprise space, Gartner estimates that 630 million business users are currently using office systems (or some portion thereof), and expects that number to grow to 1.158 billion by 2022."

While the mobile market is dominated by consumer applications, the enterprise services market is still in the early stages of development. To capture this potential, Microsoft is leveraging the web-based capabilities of established products like Office in combination with its new service offerings, Office 365, to spark the development of third party apps for the Microsoft Office Store.

With email still the dominant communication platform for enterprises, we saw an opportunity to show how technology can be used to make cloud applications for the enterprise. On July 17, on the heels of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Kofax will launch the first integrated document viewing and PDF editing and creation app for Outlook and Outlook for Office 365.

We call it Kofax View+ and if you want to see the future of email, check out the video below or download the app at no cost from the Microsoft Office Store.

distributed by