Guest Columnist: Jaspal Kohli of Mirapoint
Hybrid Messaging
Email is critical for business communications today. However, in current deployments companies may not be fully leveraging the productivity potential of their email systems. Rather than offering email accounts to all employees or including the extended workforce (e.g. agents, franchises, etc.), a large number of businesses provide a smaller population of employees with access to a high end collaboration environment that incorporates email, group calendaring, video conferencing, content management and workflow. Because these tools have a high total cost of ownership (TCO) per seat and a complex user interface, extending the use to everyone is not practical. This leaves a communications gap.
The Value of Universal Reach
There are compelling benefits to bridging this gap, allowing companies to substantially lower their communications costs, while improving productivity and security across the organization and extended workforce. Additionally, by providing universal access to email, companies can offer other communications tools, like group calendaring, to ensure uniformed scheduling of important meetings and events.
An enterprise-wide approach to email also supports implementation of best practices such as communication archiving processes, utilizing company disclaimers, or applying content-based policies. These capabilities are not available when people use external public accounts.
The Hybrid Approach
By segmenting messaging features based upon employee usage in a hybrid messaging model, companies reduce costs and deliver effective communications to all user groups. For example, the highly collaborative employee is a prime candidate for a traditional thick-client messaging solution that includes video conferencing and robust calendaring features. For users whose jobs don't require as high a level of collaboration, a thin-client solution-such as Webmail-will suffice.
There are several key considerations of any hybrid messaging model. While TCO plays the major role, scalability and reliability of the solution are also critical. Supporting a wide range of clients and platforms is also important. Users should be able to choose a desktop client that supports standard protocols like POP (Post Office Protocol) and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). Simple, easy-touse web-based and mobile clients enable a deskless or mobile scenario, important for remote workers, franchises, etc. The ability to customize (e.g. via branding or portal integration) the user interface and delegate administration to smaller sub-groups can be key enablers for some environments. The solution must also provide security in terms of protection against threats (e.g. SPAM, viruses, malware, etc.), content filtering and privacy.
Because a hybrid model supports a diverse user community, a base level of interoperability for email addressing and transport should be enabled via SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol). Additional levels of interoperability can be utilized with other standard protocols and specific points of integration.
Using a hybrid approach, it is possible today to costeffectively offer universal email and calendaring across a large corporation. A wide range of options exist ranging from Linux-based open source, commercial software packages, managed and hosted service, or even a secure and hardened email appliance. In the end, businesses benefit when everyone communicates. JK/TMP