Any modern day Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep in 2015 and woke to the headline “Slack Intends to Adopt Watson Conversation for Slackbot” may be forgiven a feeling of bewilderment as they adjust to the enterprise messaging landscape of 2016. Remember when they nodded off it was all about Yammer and Jive.

The Slackbot referred to in the perplexing headline is a customer service “bot” used by the developers of the Slack messaging platform. It will now incorporate IBM’s Watson services - such as Conversation, Sentiment Analysis and speech APIs - to improve the accuracy and efficiency of trouble-shooting.

"Slack offers unprecedented internal transparency to organizations of all sizes around the world. As an increasing number of functional teams — from finance, customer support and HR, to recruiting, marketing and sales — have integrated their workflows into Slack, the degree of leverage we can gain from enhanced cognitive capabilities becomes massive," said Stewart Butterfield, CEO and co-founder of Slack.

"We want Slack to become better and smarter the more you use it. We want to make it simpler for people to keep up with the most important conversations and to supercharge their ability to find fast answers. This partnership with IBM and the work we are doing with Watson, will accelerate our customers' organizational intelligence and propel workplace productivity in dramatic new ways."

While Slack works hard at being smart (digest that if you can) Microsoft this week muddied the collaboration waters even further with the announcement of a new chat-based workspace in Office 365, Microsoft Teams.

It seems the expensive addition of Yammer to the Microsoft toolkit was not enough as Microsoft says that Teams “further enhances the collaboration capabilities in Microsoft Office 365.”

To assist with this, it includes a “library of emojis, GIFs, custom stickers and memes gives people a fun way to express personality within their digital workspace.”

One might ask how did work ever get done in the past without this vital resource?

CEO Satya Nadella says Teams serves different needs than Yammer, which acts as a company bulletin board, and Skype, a real-time communications tool.

If you are concerned about the record-keeping implications of moving important business communication to Teams, Microsoft seeks to reassure that it offers “advanced security and compliance capabilities provided by the Microsoft Cloud.”

A new report from analyst firm Osterman Research places some doubt on this assurance. The report, commissioned by a vendor of a compliance solution for Office365, unsurprisingly concludes that “a blend of Microsoft and non-Microsoft solutions is the best approach for assuring compliance with eDiscovery and regulatory requirements, thereby removing the threat of serious legal and financial penalties.”

"For Microsoft, Office 365 is first-and-foremost a day-to-day communication and collaboration cloud environment a market in which it hotly competes against Google, Slack, Huddle and others. And, while Office 365 delivers obvious eDiscovery and regulatory benefits, some shortcomings remain. This is likely due to conflicting priorities and design goals, such as those between day-to-day interaction and long-term retention," said Michael Osterman, President, Osterman Research.

The inconvenient requirement for “long-term retention” has become an issue of some note in the present US presidential election, in relation to Mrs Clinton’s emails, and now around 650,000 emails found on the notebook of former US congressman Anthony Weiner.

With the 2016 presidential election less than a week away, the FBI is predicting that the emails' review, despite the aid of technology in filtering out duplicates already reviewed in the previous FBI investigation of Mrs Clinton’s private email server, could possibly extend beyond Election Day.

Although the task is made considerably easier by the fact that Clinton and Weiner communicated via the antique medium of email, rather than via Slack, Jive, HipChat, Jitter‎, Huddle or any other hot new messaging platform du jour. Although if Mr Weiner’s Outlook client was configured to remove email messages from Mrs Clinton’s private email server, as it presumably was (or the investigation would have been over before it began), it does throw further light on her slack record-keeping practices as Secretary of State (That’s slack in the original sense).

(Microsoft Teams is now available for those with Office 365 Enterprise or Business plans. Office 365 IT administrators can enable Microsoft Teams for their organisation from the Office 365 admin centre.)

Bill Dawes is the Publisher/Editor of Image & Data Manager.