It isn't. That is just google fanboy-ism (very prevalent here these days). Simply nothing that thread, filter, sort, slice and dice like a modern e-mail client - which explains the dominance of mailists for real conversation and debate. But then you'll get the people who use hotmail or whatever complaining mailists are sooo hard to use and we should all use web forums - which are just about the worst form of communication ever invented.

Ditto, NNTP is dead.

Yes, introduce a dozen new complicated tools in order to solve the network & system documentation problem!

Seriously, allot of the above is a GOOD idea (especially #9 - Get groupware and USE groupware! But you may very well be able to use what you already have, which almost always beats adding yet-another-silo).

Just beware just adding yet another glob of complexity that itself would need to be documented.

There is no way to cheat towards useful documentation. I think there are two rules:
Rule#1 - Please, in the name of all that is Holy, do *NOT* create a *^&@( Wiki. Write documentation. A Wiki is *NOT* documentation.
Rule#2 - Learn how to properly use M$-Office or OpenOffice. Seriously, this will make create and maintaining good and thorough documentation. In OpenOffice (sorry, don't know a darn thing about M$-Office) you can create a master document (ODM) that aggregates other documents and that will automatically create a table-of-contents, index, etc... if you use the styles correctly. It is *WONDERFUL* to use. And each section as its own file is much easier to maintain that one MASSIVE document and the auto-indexing makes it pretty easy to look stuff up (which also very much helps in keeping docs up to date). I have no doubt that M$-Office has the same features packaged somehow.

Documenting, especially creating documentation someone can actually use, is just plain hard work.