Today social project management service Wrike announced a new Outlook plugin that integration project collaboration into Microsoft’s e-mail client. As part of the announcement, the company published the below infographic on the ongoing importance of e-mail in the social media era.

The idea of unified communications has been around for a while – but what about unified communications and collaboration? I’ve been making the case for a while now that activity streams are the main UI breakthrough for social collaboration tools, and that these tools need to be able to both receive streams from other applications (for example, ERP or CRM apps) and embed streams in other applications (e-mail or dashboarding apps, for example). Tools like Qontext, TIBCO tibbr and Simplybox are working this angle in varying ways.

But where things could get really interesting is a full integration between voice, e-mail and social collaboration. tibbr and Cisco Quad are starting down this road already, and Google has strong potential to integrate Google Apps Gmail, Google Voice and the various Google Plus features (such as Circles and Hangouts) into a killer unified communication and collaboration platform. Meanwhile, harmon.ie and Wrike could help Microsoft bridge this gap by bringing social into Microsoft’s unified collaboration world – if they can get the integration issue licked. I compared the approaches of tibbr and harmon.ie at ReadWriteWeb earlier this year.

Wrike already offers integrations with Jive and Google Apps, and has an API. Here are some more details on Wrike’s Outlook plugin: