There are dozens of ways to contact the people we work withsome just work more effectively than others. You can shout to someone in the next cube, but that doesnt work well for someone in a different office. You can send that person e-mail, but if he only checks his inbox once a day, you might be waiting 24 hours for a reply. You could call him, but some people dont want to be bothered by the phone, and let all calls go to voice mail. You can fax someone and hope theres paper in the tray on the other end of the line (and that the printout gets delivered). You can place your trust in the U.S. Postal Service or any number of overnight delivery services, and have to choose between speed and cost.

We could list all the things that could possibly go wrong when youre trying to communicate with your employees, partners, or customers, but you probably already know the limitations of these communication tools. Depending on your business (and some luck), some work and some dont. And what works well for some companies may be a disaster for another. Finding something that works is what makes a company successful.

No carrier is an island. More than ever, its important to connect to your employees (both in and out of the office), customers, agents and brokers, and the ever-growing number of business partnersthird-party providers of software and services. And that means more than exchanging messages. Sometimes it means giving these outsiders access to your corporate data; a billing provider needs to know who to bill, for instance. The result is a juggling act: You can make access simple, fast, or safepick any two.