I am searching for a software solution that integrates / unifies my communication. I use email, instant messaging, SMS and phone. I would like to get all emails, SMS, instant messaging dialogs and meta-data about phone calls into one application.
Important is that I can access all past communication with one application.
There should be a global address-book to map the communication data
to persons or organizations.
I want all the communication data in one place to access and backup
it easily.
The software solution is not required to be multi-user application
or server application. It is just for one user (me) only, but server
or multi-user applications are not excluded. I may run it on a
server hardware.
It should run on Linux (Lubuntu / Ubuntu prefered).
Free and OpenSource software is prefered.
It would be nice if I could perform new communication (like
writing a new email, sms, etc.) with one application, but that is
not a must have requirement. I could also work with different
applications dedicated for different types of communication like
IM-application for IM and email-application for email, if all that
communication data from the specialized applications will be
delivered to one single place where I can access and backup it.
I have an android phone and currently I am using Google contacts as the address-book. In the long term this may change, to get back the control over my data.
I did some Internet search but did not find a nice solution, yet. If I am looking for unified messaging and unified communication, am I on the right track?
The current Thunderbird version has IM functionality integrated. Did not try it, yet.
For SMS it may be possible to use an app to send every SMS (incoming and outgoing) as an email, but I am not sure if those SMS-emails can be mapped to an address-book contact. I don't remember exactly, but isn't there a Google android app (I think Google voice) integrating SMS into google services? But in Germany this function has not been released, yet.
Maybe a groupware solution would solve the requirements, but I don't have much experience with it.
As communication possibilites are groing, I am woundering that there seems to be such a big gap of solutions. I can't believe I am the only one who would like solution, better integrating all the communication channels more easily.
If you know a software solution that solves these requirements (partly) I would be glad if you tell me about it.
Thanks in advance.
