The deaths of famous celebrities, like The Beatles’ Paul McCartney, have long been fodder for the rumor mill. So persistent was the “Paul is Dead” rumor that in 1969 LIFE magazine wrote a cover story addressing the claim. Nearly 50 years later, McCartney is still playing to packed stadiums and receiving rave reviews. 

I was reminded of this story when considering some of the recent pronouncements of the “end of email” in the popular press and by industry analysts. Paraphrasing Mark Twain, I believe “the report of the death of email is an exaggeration.” Let me explain why.

Social collaboration is essential to the future of business but the key is that social is not enough. For example, how do you enable mobile business collaboration using only social tools—without email? Email remains the lowest common denominator for mobile communications. It is not dependent on platform, can receive and send attachments and, perhaps most importantly, is accessible outside of the firewall. 

At Ektron, we built the eIntranet to provide all the benefits inherent in the social business tools that are garnering so much media attention today. Ektron’s eIntranet uses email as the vehicle to power business collaboration for the mobile worker. And, using eIntranet’s email enablement, mobile workers can do much more than simply receive notices of activities occurring on their collaborative intranet.

An app or mobile-enabled website cannot provide the ubiquitous access to the intranet for business users that email currently does. The biggest challenge, access from outside the firewall to the network, is solved by the eIntranet’s e-mail enablement approach to mobile collaboration.

For example, status updates are emailed automatically and replies sent through a mobile device’s email client are posted back to the activity stream on the intranet. To power document collaboration, eIntranet sends files as attachments to mobile team members who can then check out and make changes to the document on their mobile device. When the updated document is emailed back, eIntranet automatically adds it to the appropriate group space as a new version of the document being worked on, tracking all historical information.

Consider this Business Week article from 1975 on the “office of the future.” Much of what was predicted has come true and has had the positive benefits envisioned. One source predicted, however, that by 1990 “most record-handling will be electronic.” Twenty years after the predicted time-frame, the goal of the paperless office is just now coming close to being a reality.

At Ektron, we believe that email’s demise is similar to the quest for a paperless office. We may want some of the noise in our inboxes to be quieted by social tools and they may indeed be—some day. In the meantime, you need social business tools that help you get business goals accomplished. Email remains the best way to do so, given the entire IT infrastructure in which these tools have to exist.