Email Productivity

Another (and Perhaps the Most Compelling) Reason to Archive

Michael Osterman — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 09:56:25 +0000

I have been banging the email archiving drum for many years, urging organizations of all sizes and across all industries to archive their email. Just as individuals archive their tax and other important records, business records should be archived for as long as necessary. However, many organizations are still resistant to archiving for reasons that range from a perception of excessive TCO for archiving technology to a desire not to retain “smoking guns” that might portray a company in a negative light during a legal action.

In most cases, the adoption of email archiving is driven by a need to address e-discovery, legal hold or regulatory compliance—much of it driven by specific regulators’ demands or an impending lawsuit—and less by IT’s desire to let users access their own archived content on a self-service basis. However, Dr. Nathaniel Borenstein, the chief scientist at Mimecast, is touting the real time use of archived email in a novel way: as a means of improving decision making when composing new emails.

Borenstein cites an example of typing an email and having real time information from the corporate archive pop up alongside the email based on a real time, semantic analysis of the content. Used in this way, an archive could inform email senders of relevant information, such as others’ communications with the recipient of the email, the recipient organization’s sales history, or its customer service history. As but one example, a salesperson who is composing an email to a key client could be presented with information as they type about a problem that the client is experiencing—information that might change the wording or tone of the email.

Using an email archive in combination with semantic analysis could provide enormous benefits, including faster and better informed decision making, fewer compliance problems, better customer service, and more accurate communications with clients, business partners and others. Of course, it would require a number of things that most organizations don’t have right now, including the archival of content in at least near real time and retention of content that today would probably be discarded. The latter point, for example, could result in significantly greater storage requirements and would require lots of computing horsepower so that relevant information could be identified and presented in real time.

More difficult, however, might be justifying these types of capabilities to senior management. For example, archiving to reduce the cost of e-discovery or to comply with regulatory obligations is a relatively easy sell given that the penalties for not doing so can be significant and a compelling ROI can be made. However, enabling real-time archiving to help users send better informed emails – while extremely valuable—offers “soft” benefits that are much more difficult to justify. That said, this evolution of archiving is among the more novel and interesting that we have heard about and one that I look forward to seeing in action.

Some Thoughts on Lotusphere and the New Communications Paradigm

Michael Osterman — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:39:53 +0000

There is lots of talk about email going away: some are swearing completely off of email, others complain about how many messages they receive in their inbox, others use only email. Our own research shows that for many corporate workers, the importance of email continues to grow. Add to all of this the continuing discussions about migrating from GroupWise to “Outlook” (the subject of an upcoming blog post), how Notes/Domino is losing share to Exchange, etc.

However, does it really matter? The fundamental goal of email when it was invented decades ago was to enable people to communicate in a more efficient way. That goal has never changed, but the tools that are available to corporate decision makers to enable that efficiency have. For example, we now have social tools that can enable communication in a way that enables easier access to and analysis of employee and customer sentiment. We have collaboration tools that make it easier for groups to work on a document instead of sending a file to everyone via email. We have text messaging and instant messaging that enable bursty types of communication that are more efficient than email.

Spending time at Lotusphere last week reinforced my view that IBM, more than many other vendors, really understands the new paradigm. To them it’s not so much about Notes/Domino losing share to Exchange (which, on a worldwide basis, is questionable anyway given that there are more Domino servers under management than at any time in the company’s history) or cloud vs. on-premise or social media vs. email. Instead, it’s about how communications is evolving into a new platform that integrates social into the business fabric—integrating new paradigms with the old where it makes sense to do so. It’s about a shift in corporate culture that doesn’t focus on siloes of information, but instead uses a variety of communication modes in a way that makes the most sense. For example, email need not—and should not—succumb to social media, but instead evolve into a tool that enables integration of various communication types that makes sense given a particular organization’s culture, regulatory environment, today’s customer base, future customer base, the geographic distribution of its employees and other factors.

The bottom line is that email—and every other mode of electronic communication—is about how to let employees and customers communicate, collaborate, learn, change and act in a way that meets their needs and those of their employer. Those who get caught up in the email vs. social media vs. Web 2.0 vs. cloud vs. on-premise vs. whatever else discussion are often missing the bigger picture: this is much more about business and getting things done efficiently, and not so much about technology.

Retain Emails Or Risk Fines

Stephanie Jordan — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 02:54:31 +0000

The need for organizations to retain emails will continue in 2012, regardless of business size. On the heels of December news that Citigroup agreed to a $750,000 (USD) civil fine for not retaining millions of emails, it is a sober reminder that losing email is not an option for regulated industries. While Citigroup should receive some kudos for self-reporting its loss (which occurred during an upgrade of its email archiving system between October 2008 and December 2009) the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) still determined the incident to be inexcusable.

I recently heard that Atos, one of Europe’s largest technology companies, plans to phase out email between colleagues over the next three years. The company’s more than 75,000 employees will be required to communicate with each other via instant messaging and a Facebook-style interface instead. This is the first I have heard of such a policy, but I doubt that 2012 will see a lot of this type of action. The company hopes this plan will increase productivity because the volume of email, which the company estimates to be up to 20 hours worth of worktime, is reportedly not translating to useful time spent. Of course email from outside the company will still be floating around. The idea is being met with both criticism and accolades.

“The goal of reducing the amount of data that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives is noble,” comments Nick Mehta, CEO of LiveOffice, a cloud-based email archiving company. “However, the idea of moving to a new communication mechanism is simply shifting the problem. The problem is that there is too much information and too much communication. This data explosion will follow you to whatever communication media you use.”

I have to agree with Mehta. Email is not going away. In fact, a new study published by Return Path, Inc. makes the point that while desktop and webmail use might be decreasing, a top (and increasing) use of smartphones is access to email. The study takes a look at the impact mobile is having on email viewing. (Note that webmail might have decreased by 11% according to the study, but it was still found to be the dominant platform (44%) for email access.)

In the study, Return Path researchers make this prediction: “Email is an important business tool, so some combination of desktop and webmail use is likely to remain dominant well into 2012. But the number of people who opt for smartphones increases each quarter, meaning email viewership on these devices will continue to grow. Add in the iPad and we predict that mobile viewership number will tick up by a measurable amount by the end of 2012.”

With email use firmly in play, the need to archive continues,no matter where it is accessed. As if to punctuate the news of Citigroup, Osterman Research and ArcMail just published a timely report called “The Critical Importance of Archiving in the Financial Services Industry.” (The paper is offered at no cost if you register with ArcMail.) It is filled with valuable takeaways for financial services firms as well as organizations in other markets, and provides three key steps that businesses can take to address compliance and retention obligations:

Every company, regardless of its size, must develop policies focused on the retention of its business records.
It is critical to deploy archiving technology that can satisfy content retention policies for email messages and their attachments, as well as potentially other types of content such as files, social media posts, instant messaging conversations and other data.
Choose an archiving system that can integrate with and satisfy other organizational requirements, such as making content available in a format that will satisfy regulators, external legal counsel and others.

Osterman notes early in the paper that “Some financial services firms do not archive their email and other electronic content because of their misperception that it is less expensive to pay the fines associated with non-compliance. That said, it is difficult to ascertain exactly how many firms fail to meet their retention obligations because few decision makers are willing to admit publicly that they are making a conscious decision to violate federal and other requirements for preservation of content. However, given the financial meltdown that began in late 2008, we can surmise with almost absolute certainty that government and industry oversight of the financial services sector in the context of data retention will become more stringent and more difficult over the next several years, and that archiving systems will play an even more important role in helping financial services firms to comply with their regulatory and legal obligations.”

The paper offers a list of current compliance requirements and steps to address compliance.

“The question facing financial services firms today is no longer whether to retain data, but how much to retain and how to go about getting the job done right,” says Rory Welch, CEO of ArcMail.

Although Welch is focusing on the financial services industry, others can benefit from best practices and adopt what makes the most sense for their industry types. With many compliance rules pertaining to data about employee and customers, most all businesses have some component of the need to retain email.

One thing we know for sure about 2012, email is not going away. Despite attempts like the one being planned by Atos. Like many, Mehta believes, “Previous attempts to move off of email (IM, Google Wave, etc.) have by and large been failures. The problem is the work culture—not the communication system.” However it turns out, it will be an interesting case study to follow.

Whether it is email, IM, or social media, data retention is indeed a challenge, due in large part to the sheer volume that passes through each messaging technology and the variety available. But a constant among all of it is the need to manage the medium regardless of type and find a reliable archiving technology that works for you.

Patton's SmartNode Products Certified Interoperable with Lotus Sametime

Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 22:07:56 +0000

Patton is a multi-national organization that designs, develops, and manufactures electronic communications equipment for network access, connectivity, VoIP, triple-play and video surveillance that is making consistently big waves in the Unified Communications (UC) space. At ITExpo in February, they announced, in alliance with the Elastix project – an open source UC distribution project – that they had released a mutually certified UC solution.

Now, Patton (USA) and Patton-Inalp (Switzerland) have announced that IBM has tested and certified the company’s SmartNode VoIP gateways, VoIP routers and IADs for interoperability with the Lotus Sametime unified communications (UC) platform.Why is this important? With SmartNode VoIP routers, Patton says large enterprises can control capital expenses while implementing UC by integrating existing public branch exchange phone systems and PSTN connections into IBM’s Lotus Sametime platform.

Sametime was designed to remove the seams between email, voicemail, instant messaging, wired and wireless phones while providing presence status, Company officials said that this enables workers to avoid such time wasters as looking up contact information and calling people who aren’t available. Moreover, SmartNode gateways offer immediate access to the world of UC for organizations using traditional analog or digital phone systems. Working together, the companies could feasibly create an even better connected world.

Their specs boast impressive any-service-any-port (ASAP) capabilities that can deliver any WAN service on every industry-standard telephony interface that is currently in use. Built to be highly scalable (SMBs all the way to enterprise-sized organizations), SmartNode scales from 2 to 120 concurrent VoIP or fax calls, and supports SIP, H.323, ISDN, and POTS telephony plus T.38 and SuperG3 FAX over TDM/PSTN and IP/Ethernet services simultaneously.

Company officials said that most IBM-certified VoIP equipment is less scalable in terms of interface types, port counts, and number of concurrent calls. SmartNode enriches IBM’s Sametime solution with advanced telephony features. Therefore, it upgrades a legacy solution in all the right ways.

These features include integration of PSTN trunks and legacy PBX systems into Sametime/Telephony Control Server (TCS); VoIP and data survivability via PSTN access/breakout/fallback and IP link redundancy; PBX backup against IP trunk failure to the IBM TCS; secure VPNs with IPsec-encrypted voice.

Additional features include any-to-any least-cost call routing and dial-map planning; routed Internet Access with QoS for toll quality voice; traffic management with voice prioritization; and more.

The Inertia of the Desktop on Messaging Decisions

Michael Osterman — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 19:40:08 +0000

Messaging systems are a cost of doing business. Like any utility that must operate 24×7, email and, to a lesser extent real-time communications systems, are vital to the operation of just about any information- and communications-focused business. And, like a utility, decision makers need to drive down the cost of providing messaging services while not compromising on the quality of those services.

There are a number of very good messaging platforms offered as on-premise or cloud-based solutions that are significantly less expensive than many of the current messaging systems in place today. Many of these alternatives offer the same or better performance, they run on less expensive hardware, they support higher server loadings, or they can be managed with less IT staff involvement. So, why don’t more companies flock to these alternatives?

A key reason is the current desktop infrastructure, which is dominated by Microsoft Outlook. Outlook is a very good desktop client, it provides most or all of the functionality that users require, and it’s more or less ubiquitous in the workplace. It integrates nicely with Office, the dominant desktop productivity application, and is offered “free” with Office.

In a survey we conducted during 2010, we asked IT decision makers and influencers in mid-sized and large organizations the following two questions:

“If you could replace your backend messaging infrastructure with one that provided significantly better performance, server loading, lower costs or other significant advantages, but that required you to switch desktop clients, how likely would you be to switch?”
“If you could replace your backend messaging infrastructure with one that provided significantly better performance, server loading, lower costs or other significant advantages, but that allowed you to keep your current desktop clients, how likely would you be to switch?”

What we found is that if the desktop client had to be switched, only 16% of respondents indicated that their organization would likely or definitely switch. However, if the desktop client could be retained and only the backend of the messaging system was swapped, that figure jumped to 43%—a difference of 2.6 times.

As I see it, there is both a near-term and a long-term story here. Near term, for alternative messaging systems to gain traction they will need to be compatible with Microsoft Outlook; for users of Outlook Web Access, the Web experience offered by an alternative will need to be virtually identical. The reason is simple: IT departments don’t want to go through the difficulty of swapping out Outlook or whatever client is currently on the desktop, and they want to avoid the inevitable wave of help desk calls every Monday morning that will follow a weekend of migrating X% of the user base to the new client. Most IT departments are already time- and resource-constrained as it is, and adding a new burden is going to be actively avoided whenever possible.

Longer term, however, I believe that the user community will need to embrace new interfaces as organizations migrate their users to the cloud for purposes of cutting their IT costs, but more importantly as they seek to reduce their real estate costs and taxes by having more users work from home. Giving users browser-based access to their communications and collaboration resources is a major benefit for organizations seeking to cut costs, and users will simply need to become less attached to their comforable desktop experience. Ultimately, the convergence of a change in user attitude—coupled with vendors providing increased functionality in the desktop experience—will lead to the desktop environment becoming less influential on messaging decisions, and greater flexibility for IT departments as they seek to reduce the cost of messaging services.

Most SMEs Investing in Web Monitoring and Filtering in Support of Policies

Stephanie Jordan — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 05:00:00 +0000

In the last installment of the Messaging News Small Business Dispatch, I noted that many online scams rely on brand names to add legitimacy to the nefarious requests for credit card numbers, bank details, passwords and to plant malware. The need to monitor site traffic as a Web security tactic grows as this kind of activity continues. Organizations of all sizes are using Web monitoring and Web filtering solutions, including 69.9 percent of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), according to a new survey by GFI Software. GFI reports that SMEs use the technology “to block offensive sites, stop malware infections from downloaded files and to prevent malware attacks from drive-by downloads.” The GFI survey respondents were either IT management or IT staff working in network management and administration. Only 8.9 percent had over 500 employees.

Employees, Social Networking, and Cyberslacking

“Cyberslacking.” Sounds fun doesn’t it? No doubt it is, but not necessarily desirable when you are paying employees for a work product. But blocking social media is not really possible anymore, especially as businesses continue to seek ways to use the medium as part of a business strategy. In fact, GFI notes that the most valuable brands in the world are experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement. If it needs to be open for business, how do you close it off for personal employee use? The simple answer is, most companies don’t. In GFI’s survey of SMEs, respondents were asked if employees were allowed to surf the Internet for personal reasons during breaks. Eighty-five percent said yes, however, all used Web filtering to restrict what employees can view and access.

This restriction is well founded, not only to prevent cyberslackers from whiling away the hours, but also to keep threats at bay. In its Q3 2010 Internet Threat Trend Report, out this week, Commtouch Labs shows that hyperlinked malware and HTML attachments saw a “significant increase” as attachments either “displayed phishing pages or redirected users to sites hosting malware or spam.” Unsuspecting users can easily be fooled by these very sophisticated ploys.

Acceptable Use Policy Guidelines

GFI notes that: “While organizations are happy to allow employees to access the Internet for personal reasons, they are not giving them access to sites that are known to contribute most to loss in productivity / cyberslacking and those sites that are bandwidth-hungry. It also may be the case that organizations are only allowing access at certain times of the day, for example, during employees’ lunch break or after hours. Blogs and news sites are the categories of Websites blocked the least by respondents to the survey.”

Commtouch Labs reports that during the third quarter of 2010, the Web sites most likely to be compromised with malware continue to be pornographic sites—parked domains, business, computers & technology, and education round out the top five. For phishing threats, the top five are games, sex education, shopping, travel and computers & technology.

The use of Web monitoring is gaining acceptance among employees. Of those in the GFI survey, 92.5 percent inform their employees that online activity inside the organization may be monitored. Along with notifying employees of the policy, management should also work to educate employees on the “why” and learn about the potential risks they may bring into their company.

Email & Productivity

Stephanie Jordan — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:12:29 +0000

According to IT research firm Gartner, non-work-related Internet surfing results in an estimated 40 percent productivity loss each year for American businesses. While the Web surfing productivity drain is a loss to the company, there is another less talked about productivity drain that can directly hurt individual employees: the email inbox.

Marsha Egan, CEO of The Egan Group, Inc. — an executive and life coaching firm — is the author of Inbox Detox and the Habit of E-mail Excellence, a book that helps employees and executives examine and improve their email habits to save time and increase productivity. Egan challenges workers (and businesses) to admit that they have poor email habits.

“Email is a very effective communication tool upon which businesses rely heavily,” says Egan. “However, we have developed a dependency on email that saps productivity. Many people can’t keep up with their inbox and simply declare email bankruptcy.”

Egan points to statistics that show many employees check work email over weekends and while on vacation. “It’s clear that in the new decade, email users must take control their email before it controls them,” she declares. Egan asserts that between reading, responding, and recovery time, the average email interruption takes four minutes of valuable work time. “If a worker receives an average of 15 email interruptions per day, one hour of time is lost to email interruptions. If that worker is part of a 20-person department, 20 hours of work time are lost per day. Then, if the employees average $20 USD per hour, the company loses $2000 USD per week due to a loss of worker productivity.”

Egan believes that without healthy email habits, the problems will only get worse. While seemly simple, there are a few steps that Egan recommends:

Place the main point, assignment, or request in the first two lines of the email. People have a tendency to build up to a conclusion when they write. At times, this habit makes it very difficult for email readers to figure out what the main issue or request is. By putting your main point in the first two sentences, you can avoid misinterpretations and get readers focused on exactly what you want, right from the get-go.

Keep emails short. When you send short, easy-to-read messages, people will respond in the same manner and you save incredible amounts of time sorting through your inbox.

Send less email. While this may seem a no-brainer, email begets email. Consider your alternatives. In many cases, it is better and easier to pick up the phone, visit the would-be recipient’s desk, or simply not respond.

“There is a cure for our current email e-ddiction,” Egan says. “If you practice productive email habits, you will not only loosen the grip email has on you, but you will also reclaim hours of productive time every day.”

More on increasing email productivity can be found on her website and her blog.

Eye on Messaging is written by Stephanie Jordan, editor in chief of Messaging News. If you have story ideas or news to share, email her: sjordan [at] messagingnews [dot] com