Email archiving
Article Date: Feb 16 2006
Electronic communication is now integral to corporate success, with billions of business emails sent around the world every day.
However, as we’ve all probably come to realise, email has drawbacks, most notably that (unlike snail mail) it doesn’t necessarily leave a paper trail, it can be hard to find a particular missive among thousands you’ve received, and, moreover, emails are far too easily deleted or infected by viruses. This means vital contacts and business critical information can be wiped out in an instant. In light of this, it’s not surprising that email archiving systems are becoming popular.
Make the most of your data
According to Andrew Lochart, of email security and services firm Postini, businesses seek out such solutions for three main reasons. ‘The first,’ he elaborates, ‘relates to document retention. Emails are often key business documents and if, for example, a company is being sued it will be vital for its defence to produce all the relevant documentation it possess relating to that issue.
‘The regulatory environment is also important,’ he continues, ‘although this only tends to affect certain heavily monitored industries such as financial services.’ In certain sectors, he points out, businesses are legally obliged to keep copies of all their correspondence for a specific period of time, say five years. ‘Finally, there is operational archiving. The focus here is on removing old emails from a system [to prevent mailservers from becoming swamped] while keeping the contained content accessible.’
As Lochart suggest, email archiving systems should therefore appeal to business owner-managers for a multitude of pragmatic, if not exactly compelling, reasons. To others, however, appropriate archiving can also offer a more proactive route to sales growth.
Tracking sales and collating reports
‘The vast majority of business collaboration occurs via email,’ comments Steve Jones of archiving solutions business Kinomi. ‘So, there’s a huge amount of unstructured data on company systems that isn’t very visible yet may be extremely useful to the rest of the organisation. We offer a way of getting your hands on the important information contained within emails.’
Linguistic analysis is the basis of this system, with Kinomi’s software being able to identity key words and phrases contained within emails and then flagging up appropriate messages up to relevant individuals. ‘Take sales staff, for instance,’ postulates Kinomi managing director Nigel Cannings. ‘Most absolutely hate using complex sales-management systems like Siebel, but with this you can see what your team is up to everyday, what leads they are following up, and so on. You can also set-up your own taxonomies to pull out the right information, for instance, daily sales reports.’
Outsourcing the solution
With all archiving solutions there are two prerequisites: hardware (a server to store the archived messages on) and software (providing a means for ordering and retrieving information). For growing firms, an in-house archiving system can therefore be difficult to implement because of the associated costs and complexities.
To address this, many firms (including the likes of Kinomi and Postini) offer a managed service, installing no actual hardware or software on site but utilising the internet to provide an outsourced service remotely instead. The rationale for this model is that specialist IT staff aren’t needed to monitor and maintain the system. ‘Business chiefs ought to be able to concentrate on making sure the business is good at what it does, not be spending time focusing on email security – ‘it just isn’t a core competency,’ Lochart concludes.
