What is Synchronous?

Last week a customer asked me whether I would classify Persistent Chat as synchronous or asynchronous. Good question. My simple answer is both. In fact, chat is the perfect application to bridge the gap between the synchronous and synchronous world. It is synchronous, or real-time, when all members of a team are available and actively participating in a conversation. This is great when your team members are in overlapping time zones but maybe they are unable to sit next to each other due to their physical locations. At the same time, Persistent Chat can be asynchronous since a user can join a conversation after the fact and read through the conversation history, or backchat. This is useful when you are working with a team that is in a different time zone, such as an offshore development team. Or perhaps you are traveling and you simply want to read about what your team did while you were away from the office.

Because of these scenarios, the answer seems fairly complete: Persistent Chat is both synchronous and asynchronous. But consider this: what if Persistent Group Chat actually changes the definition of what is synchronous? Maybe synchronous no longer means a group of people communicating in real time, but instead refers to a group of people being completely in-sync on a topic of conversation. Persistent Chat does this through the persistence of the conversations as well as the filters and intelligent notifications that ensure that people are always up-to-date on information that is important to them. The result is that they are in-sync with their team members, regardless of whether the team is able to communicate in real-time.

In the end, Persistent Chat is the solution that brings teams together around topics, and keeps everyone up-to-date on those topics. Persistent Chat keeps everyone in sync, and therefore Persistent Chat should be considered Synchronous.