The impact of e-mail on businesses these days is enormous. Companies use e-mail to conduct business, for responding to clients, for internal communication, for discussing strategy, and for responding to regulations. Roughly 35 billion e-mails are sent a day, and the number is growing. The Radicati Group estimates that by the end of 2006, 52 billion e-mails will be sent daily, including all types of correspondence. More importantly, 60 percent of business-critical data is sent via e-mail, according to Gartner.
E-mail Evolution
Unsupervised and improperly disciplined e-mail behavior causes headaches to corporate management. Viruses hiding within e-mails can cause huge harm to organizations. The fact that so many e-mails are sent every day means that there is a chance of inappropriate e-mails (with respect to virus content, sensitivity or privacy issues, incorrect addresses, and so on) slipping through. Yet organizations do need to focus on storing business-critical information, and it is essential that this information is properly stored so that it is accessible and reusable.
E-mail management aims at the preservation of e-mails and the information contained within them. Historically, e-mail management consisted only of storing and preserving e-mails to optimize server efficiency. The focus of e-mail management today, however, has shifted to addressing regulatory compliance more than anything else.
The current market seeks to integrate e-mail management with a full document and records management (RM) solution. This enables organizations to index e-mails, and provides users the ability to search and to use the repository as a knowledge archive.
Currently, most content management vendors have already moved towards integrating an e-mail management solution with an RM solution. Examples include EMC/Documentum's acquisition of Legato, a provider of e-mail archiving products, and IBM's integration with iLumen, a provider of enterprise message management tools.
Knowing What to Store
Storing e-mails or any other kind of data is not problematic for organizations. The cost of extra storage space has decreased significantly over the last decade. The problem is knowing which e-mail content to store and preserve, and which to destroy.
Organizations need to set forth policies on e-mail usage. Policies should address not only e-mail use and misuse, but also retention and destruction. According to research conducted by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), 80 percent of organizations have some kind of policy for e-mail use, but 60 percent have no formal policy governing its retention. Organizations need to rethink their strategies on e-mail management: currently, 31 percent of all organizations keep e-mails indefinitely, and preserve 26 percent of e-mails for less than 120 days, or establish a maximum storage on people's inboxes to limit the retention.
The problem with this approach is that inadequate restrictions or improper methods can eventually harm the organization itself. For example, internal e-mails regarding lunch appointments do not need to be saved, while an e-mail regarding a lunch appointment with a business client should be. Saving all e-mails in the hopes of preventing some information loss is not the right solution. On average, according to AIIM, 75 percent of e-mails are not useful for saving, but finding the 25 percent that are important can be quite difficult.
One potential solution is to create business rules within archiving software. These business rules avoid unnecessary storage, as users can flag the e-mails they want to archive. Defining these rules has to be a joint effort between the information technology (IT) department and the business sector to make sure it covers more than just the technical side of actual e-mail storage. Flagging should be made possible based on a company name, keywords, subject or message text, the sender, or even the software used to send the e-mail.
However, users should not have full control on what should be saved within the e-mail management business rules: this should be controlled at a systems level. This way, the basic principles will be governed at the administrative level, while individuals can refine the rules on a more personal level.
Manage Volume and Risk
The volume of e-mails grows daily. And it's not just the number of messages, but also their size. Organizations deal with all sorts of messages: chain letters, joke-of-the-day e-mails, lunch meetings and arrangements, business e-mails, and so on. E-mail also grows in size because of attachments, pictures, movies, large documents, and even colorful signatures with company logos or theoretically witty sayings. Also, the misuse (or lack of knowledge) on the part of undisciplined users leads to unnecessary duplication of e-mails through copying and forwarding and replying, which in turn causes capacity overload. Because of this overload, organizations have to focus on managing e-mail volume.
Even though storage decreases in price every year (a 550-gigabyte hard drive currently sells competitively for about $400 [USD]—that is, $0.80 [USD] per gigabyte), retaining too many e-mails means storing needless data. The cost of retrieving the data (and the risk of not being able to find the right information within an appropriate time frame) is even more important than just the cost of storage.
E-mail Evolution
Unsupervised and improperly disciplined e-mail behavior causes headaches to corporate management. Viruses hiding within e-mails can cause huge harm to organizations. The fact that so many e-mails are sent every day means that there is a chance of inappropriate e-mails (with respect to virus content, sensitivity or privacy issues, incorrect addresses, and so on) slipping through. Yet organizations do need to focus on storing business-critical information, and it is essential that this information is properly stored so that it is accessible and reusable.
E-mail management aims at the preservation of e-mails and the information contained within them. Historically, e-mail management consisted only of storing and preserving e-mails to optimize server efficiency. The focus of e-mail management today, however, has shifted to addressing regulatory compliance more than anything else.
The current market seeks to integrate e-mail management with a full document and records management (RM) solution. This enables organizations to index e-mails, and provides users the ability to search and to use the repository as a knowledge archive.
Currently, most content management vendors have already moved towards integrating an e-mail management solution with an RM solution. Examples include EMC/Documentum's acquisition of Legato, a provider of e-mail archiving products, and IBM's integration with iLumen, a provider of enterprise message management tools.
Knowing What to Store
Storing e-mails or any other kind of data is not problematic for organizations. The cost of extra storage space has decreased significantly over the last decade. The problem is knowing which e-mail content to store and preserve, and which to destroy.
Organizations need to set forth policies on e-mail usage. Policies should address not only e-mail use and misuse, but also retention and destruction. According to research conducted by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), 80 percent of organizations have some kind of policy for e-mail use, but 60 percent have no formal policy governing its retention. Organizations need to rethink their strategies on e-mail management: currently, 31 percent of all organizations keep e-mails indefinitely, and preserve 26 percent of e-mails for less than 120 days, or establish a maximum storage on people's inboxes to limit the retention.
The problem with this approach is that inadequate restrictions or improper methods can eventually harm the organization itself. For example, internal e-mails regarding lunch appointments do not need to be saved, while an e-mail regarding a lunch appointment with a business client should be. Saving all e-mails in the hopes of preventing some information loss is not the right solution. On average, according to AIIM, 75 percent of e-mails are not useful for saving, but finding the 25 percent that are important can be quite difficult.
One potential solution is to create business rules within archiving software. These business rules avoid unnecessary storage, as users can flag the e-mails they want to archive. Defining these rules has to be a joint effort between the information technology (IT) department and the business sector to make sure it covers more than just the technical side of actual e-mail storage. Flagging should be made possible based on a company name, keywords, subject or message text, the sender, or even the software used to send the e-mail.
However, users should not have full control on what should be saved within the e-mail management business rules: this should be controlled at a systems level. This way, the basic principles will be governed at the administrative level, while individuals can refine the rules on a more personal level.
Manage Volume and Risk
The volume of e-mails grows daily. And it's not just the number of messages, but also their size. Organizations deal with all sorts of messages: chain letters, joke-of-the-day e-mails, lunch meetings and arrangements, business e-mails, and so on. E-mail also grows in size because of attachments, pictures, movies, large documents, and even colorful signatures with company logos or theoretically witty sayings. Also, the misuse (or lack of knowledge) on the part of undisciplined users leads to unnecessary duplication of e-mails through copying and forwarding and replying, which in turn causes capacity overload. Because of this overload, organizations have to focus on managing e-mail volume.
Even though storage decreases in price every year (a 550-gigabyte hard drive currently sells competitively for about $400 [USD]—that is, $0.80 [USD] per gigabyte), retaining too many e-mails means storing needless data. The cost of retrieving the data (and the risk of not being able to find the right information within an appropriate time frame) is even more important than just the cost of storage.
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