After spending a couple of days this week at the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim, Calif. one thing struck me: the incredible persistence of email. Many people, in spite of advances in the browser, continue to spend much of their work lives in Outlook.

In fact, among the many partners showing off their wares on the conference floor, was one company that made its living delivering SharePoint content inside an email client. The thinking goes, according to Barry Jinks, president and CEO, Colligo Networks, many users still spend much of their work day inside Outlook. As such, it makes sense to be providing access to SharePoint content where these workers are most comfortable.

Fair enough, and it makes sense in its own way, but wasn't email supposed to be dead? Apparently not if so many employees still spend their days in Outlook. We all know that email has become a very clogged channel full of unwanted spam. Inside corporations, even when email is not exactly spam, there are plenty of "cover-your-butt" emails ccd to you and 50 or 100 of the most important contacts.

Repeat that many times throughout the day and you have a lot of mostly useless email, but as we've known for some time, in spite of its many faults, email remains the de facto way of sharing and socializing inside many companies.

And some knowledge workers like attorneys for instance, might spend most of the day there handling client email and sharing documents with colleagues. If that's the case, having direct access to your SharePoint content without leaving to open another application makes sense.

But in many ways, it makes even more sense to direct these users to the browser where you could set up a SharePoint-centric work page with more advanced social and file sharing tools.

As we move to a more cloud-centric world view, moving these stubborn Outlook client users into the browser would seem to be a more efficient way of interacting with SharePoint.

The fact is, however, that these email-centric users are bound to be a fading breed. As was pointed out time and again at the conference, young people today don't use email at all--a fact I can attest to because I have a 16 year old. He simply never uses it. As these younger, anti-email users make their way into the workforce over the next five to 10 years, we will likely see less reliance on email as a communications method and more on other social tools such as instant messaging and micro-blogging.

As this change makes its way into the enterprise and the baby boomers make their way to the exits, we are probably going to see a more browser-centric approach moving forward, but for now, email persists and it will until those workers who rely on it because it's what they know, move on. - Ron

Correction: The original version of this commentary noted that harmon.ie works in Gmail. However, it does not. The reference has since been removed.