A brief look through Front suggests that it is a specialized ticketing system. I predict that, if successful, it will incorporate more traditional ticketing system features.
That's a problem with the end-point, not with the medium. Consider a system like RT[0]; it has no concept of an inbox, yet most (if not all) client interaction is via email. My take is that if you're tempted to set up a shared inbox, don't. Set up a ticketing system instead.
The single most important issue with email: Team Inboxes.
Yeah, that's apparently what their product is trying to address:
- Email is not adapted to the enterprise world? Make it more collaborative. Here at Front, we introduce productivity and collaborative features in a standard email client and let companies work as a team on all their incoming emails.
I had a job where I had to deal with a team inbox. It took a bit of work to get it working well. I wasn't in that job terribly long, so I don't know very much about the problem space. But, yes, it was a pain. And I hope they really do have something better to offer.
Is that really the single most important issue? I'd lean towards privacy and authentication as being more important. Team inboxes are not really a mandatory part of email.
At my last job we had several shared IMAP mailboxes. The workflow that we used that worked fairly well was to have a sub-folder for each user. When a new mail came in, you'd first move it into your folder, then handle the email.
This worked really well for us, but I think the biggest inbox only had a dozen users.
> nearly none of the products you mentioned work without an email notification feature.
Not to mention the ability to reply to those emails to add new content to those products. Building around email as a messaging backbone is incredibly powerful.
As soon as more than one person works with an inbox, it sucks big time.
But I agree - email will last forever, nearly none of the products you mentioned work without an email notification feature.