The benefit goes beyond cost savings and convenience. The fact that [e-mail] is a two-way link and provides a directory entry that includes e-mail will benefit organizations in many ways down the line, particularly as Web services and context and collaboration become more prevalent.

There hasn't been a [Windows] directory before, there's just been trees and network diagrams and information about who is on your network. This conversion will require people to really do some work.

Companies should ask themselves, what should we do?

This is going to be largely invisible to the end user.

The sooner you get to a directory structure, and the more centralized you make repositories and storage in your organization, the much better off you're going to be doing business-to-business and business-to-customer [transactions] later on down the path.

Now is the time to re-evaluate the benefits of securely delivered e-mail. It is unfortunate that [the anthrax threat] needs to be a reason for people to reconsider or re-evaluate e-mail; it is a good [idea] on its own without these unfortunate circumstances.

One of the things that Microsoft plays on is that consumers will benefit from this. If you're the only player in town then how good is that for the consumers?

Customers benefit because the information about their wants and needs can be supplied to a large number of product and service providers.

[However], it seems that the Postal Service is awfully late to the game. I think they need to be more creative and aggressive than their counterparts in the private sector.