E-mail keeps growing in volume, and so does the urgency for devising new and better ways of dealing with it. A typical office worker receives more than 100 messages a day--some get 200, 300, or more--and may send dozens more. At large companies, it adds up to millions of messages per week and many hours glued to PCs; it also hogs storage and demands hours of administrator and security pro time. E-mail has gotten so big that it's no longer a mere issue of personal productivity. Top executives and their companies are being judged on how they're controlling it, as mismanagement can lead to legal troubles.An interesting article that talks about e-mail policies as being key to help manage deluge. Interesting status report on archiving, mailbox quotas, near-line storage, and other current issues.
It doesn't talk much about using other tools for collaboration, though. The answer doesn't have to always be more mods to the e-mail system.
Link: Information Week: Businesses Struggle Under Growing Weight Of E-Mail > (Thanks, Rob)
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Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 8/24/2006 4:26:49 PM
The single biggest thing we did to help dig us out of the crush was to use a spam filtering appliance. The next big deal will be to actually enforce our e-mail use policy. I don't want to suck all the joy out of people's workday, but at the same time I don't have endless storage for the pictures that get forwarded around.
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Kevin Pettitt http://www.lotusguru.com | 8/24/2006 7:50:37 PM
Ed, great timing. I was in the middle of writing a Show-n-Tell Thursday piece related to this topic when I saw your post...
Noting that unnecessary or redundant email attachments are often what makes our mail files so huge, I've put together an agent that makes it easy for users to offload attachments from several messages at once to their file system. The attachments are replaced with a notation in the message about where they were saved. It probably won't work for those with strict email retention policies, but it might help some. The post is here: { Link }
@1 - Tom, I'm not sure I'd agree about the inevitability of other colloration tools becoming flooded the way email has become. Even a simple document library where an attached file is stored in one place rather than sent around to several people is a vast improvement. A document stored in such a way is probably also categorized in several useful ways that make it much easier to find later (by anyone, not just recipients of a particular email). And there are plenty of more advanced document management options out there that can take a significant load off of email. The real problem is that folks are often never trained in how to use such tools.
@2 - Charles, hopefully my agent will allow your users to retain some joy after you turn quotas on :-)
-Kevin
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Mike Brown | 8/25/2006 6:06:04 AM
"It doesn't talk much about using other tools for collaboration, though. The answer doesn't have to always be more mods to the e-mail system."
You said it, Ed. And let me tell you about a little chat that I just had with one of our Advertising managers. I'd already setup a Notes workflow system to handle ad bookings for him, and he wanted to know if I could do a copy of it for another Ads dept. "Of course", I said! His reaction was one of those moments:
"that's good news, because the current system makes our work easy to manage. We want to something in Notes for the other dept, because they're doing everything with emails and spreadsheets at the moment and it's getting out of control; you lose one email and that's it."
The important thing for me is that this guy said "Notes" to mean something other than email, even though Notes IS the email system here. In fact, he went further; he wants to use Notes to make all the emails go away!
@3 Nice agent, Kevin. Wish I'd found it before I'd spent time writing an almost identical one myself! Sadly, the "cool Java code that made possible the attractive dialog box" won't run on the Macintosh OS X version of the Notes client; no Java code does.
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Sean | 8/25/2006 11:05:59 AM
We strip attachments from all replies, and archive everything over a year old to another server. We use DB compression and enforce mail policies and quotas where possible. We have lots of large document libraries for files and shared emails. The biggest issue these days for us is not internal collaboration, but external. Most of the smaller companies we deal with don't host sites where you can download attachments. They simply email the files, which these days is the point of least resistance for the end users, simply because email works. The volume of email these days has grown as well and for some users answering and sending email is the only thing they do ALL DAY.
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Bill Brown | 8/25/2006 1:22:07 PM
In the sidebar article "E-Mail Lockdown", they suggest disabling the preview pane. Is there a way to do this via policies? I only saw a policy on marking document as read when previewed.
If it's not a policy, can it be added? I'd love to see it disabled.
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Kevin Pettitt http://www.lotusguru.com | 8/25/2006 3:21:01 PM
@6 - Can't speak to whether the email preview pane can be disabled through policies, but I doubt it. However, you could certainly make a simple design change to the mail template to get rid of it.
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Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 8/25/2006 4:26:16 PM
To the comment @6, it was my understanding that the preview vulnerability was only an issue for Outlook. Is Notes similarly vulnerable?
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Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 8/25/2006 4:29:50 PM
@3 - I already have something very similar in place. Users don't care, they want to forward around the pictures of cute babies and can't be bothered with anything that makes it any more difficult. As I said, I need to get an advocate in management who is willing to enforce our e-mail policies.
Great topic, I'm writing a thesis paper on the future of email in corporations. Only on page 15 out of 80, but this is a major concern for both personal and businesses. Even if users switch to different means of collaboration, it is only a matter of time until that technology gets flooded. I will be reading the comments on this blog closely.