Litigation + compliance = peace of mind
Ok, the equation in the headline usually does not offer peace of mind. On the contrary, litigation and compliance often are connoted with sweaty palms.

Because Email-Manager™ offers verbatim copies of all incoming and outgoing email correspondence you can leave your worries at the door.

Should it happen that you are asked to produce electronic evidence in court, it is imperative to know that the emails you retrieve from the email vault can be trusted to be authentic and not tampered with.

All emails carry within them a hidden information called metadata – or embedded information. The Email-Manager™ email vault is protected in a manner that makes it safe to assume, that no-one fiddles with the contents, timestamps or recipients/senders.

The way to produce the electronic evidence is fairly easy: Search a sender or receiver, a project, a date interval or even a word in the text field and the entire thread is presented to you. But how can this be possible? If we look at the search capabilities of Email-Manager™, we’ll see similarities with search engines like Google and Opera. Your emails are loosely organized in the vault and a search will collect all hits into a list of emails. This list is called the Journal. And the journal will be your electronic evidence.

Todays recession brings new challenges to companies

With the financial situation in mind, there are a lot of employees leaving corporations worldwide. This is of course an unfortunate situation for the employee but it is equally unfortunate for the corporation who looses a valuable asset. Microsoft have been using the term "Knowledgeworker" for quite some time and that just underlines the fact that when companies are laying off people, they also loose valuable information as soon as the employee is out the door.

It is therefore of great importance that there is a system in place that allows you to share information while you are working, either within teams or with the entire company, so you have resources available to pick up the ball where it was dropped.

Email-Manager is the product that helps our customers with this since it automatically captures information exchanged with business partners and immediately makes it available for relevant people within the company.

The mantra of Email-Manager is really, "Capture, Manage and Share - and do it automatically". Then it won't hurt quite as much when you have to let people go.

Keeping the private private

In these times of an ongoing tightening of security procedures and increased demands of compliance, some people are concerned about privacy.

As you know, Email-Manager™ is all about sharing and the moment an email enters our email vault, it is searchable and destined to appear in journals. Now, how does a system like Email-Manager™ handle privacy matters and how are confidential emails left out of the searches?

Users can address privacy in three ways in our system:

Remove email

If the user declines an email when it enters the system or if the user deletes an email from a journal, it will not be searchable. It is worth noticing that deleting an email from the inbox will not cause the email to be invisible to others.

Block the email address

The user can add specific persons (your spouse, squash buddy etc.) to a list in Email-Manager™, which prevents emails from these email addresses from appearing in journals.

ACL's and AD's

The administrator can setup ACL’s and AD’s which means that emails destined to these recipient groups will not appear in journals that are created by users not belonging to these groups.

As always email users are not private – especially on the company email servers they are not. The administrator can look into the email database – as he/she are able to look into the Exchange server today. When Email-Manager™ is rolled out in your company or organization; two important messages have to be delivered:

1. Emails are company property – all emails entering or leaving the company are considered to be company property and therefore they may appear in journals.
2. Recommend private email account – to prevent private emails in company servers, ask your users to create a private email account on the Internet.

Is email management nothing but compliance?

As a knowledge worker in the email business, I have read and will read countless articles on this subject. Nearly all the articles have the same focus. And – however important complying with regulatory requirements might be – it leaves one important factor out of the equation: The user.

The user, whose primary function is to generate profit or flow, must be empowered to work for the good of the organization or company, and thus the customer or citizen.
Most of the time, we are not in court – we are working. Email-Manager™ is the tool that allows today’s email user (everyone) to actively seek, find and monitor business relevant information in the entire collection of emails.

Email-Manager™ easily offers more than most traditional email management systems:

Email debate continues

As frequent readers of this blog would know, there is an ongoing email debate in the media. The latest input originates from shipIT. It is called "Realize the hidden value in your emails".
Get it here >> shipIT whitepaper

Battling the emailstrom while flogging a dead horse

When the first trains cumbersomely huffed and puffed across the landscape, self-appointed experts claimed that the speed would cause the human soul to fly out of its more earthly holster. Time and common sense proved them wrong. Today, we plan to go to Mars.

Following the slipstream of articles and comments in the leading Danish business newspaper several email professionals have given their take on email management articles. I’ll look into their statements and suggested solutions to manage the “emailstrom”.

1. Educate the entire organization to abide a set of management decided guidelines regarding email behavior.
   When has the people ever done exactly as their rulers want them to? Centralized rules tend to foresee a number of possible situations – and everyone has to comply. The idea actually works if the number of rules is kept to a minimum and nothing ever changes. And at the same time every employee has to be educated in order to understand how the rules work? I am no prophet, but what is the cost of constant education and what are the chances of an organization never changing?
   
2. Presume that every email user will read and understand the guidelines from more or less self-appointed email management experts who rampage the Internet.
   For obvious reasons this is a very bad idea. Who is responsible for keeping the mail server tidy and structured?
   
3. Stop using CC or even BCC, share email folders or assigning just one email address per department.
   Sometimes privacy is a must, why reject a fantastic feature? Having just one email address solves the sharing problem inside a department – but what about the rest of the company?

As you may deduct from the above these solutions leaves the user caught in a web of rules. Rules, that are mainly manual. Rules, that need constant scrutinizing. Rules, that force employees to circumvent rules in order to save non-compliant emails anyway. You do the math!

To me, and I am a email user, this will consume a lot of my otherwise productive time. Nevertheless, some executives might think that an organization can live and thrive being extremely regulated. To me, all of the above cannot meet the requirements of a modern, dynamic, team-based organization. These solutions are obsolete and stretch the capabilities of any traditional mail system thin: it’s flogging a dead horse.

None of the ordinary solutions address the obvious problem. Organizations need to adapt to changes rapidly: colleagues leave, get promoted, change department etc. And that’s just the simple stuff! When it comes to retrieving emails from the mail server sent by long gone employees from departments that do not exist any longer, monitoring business sensitive email threads in a glance or being able to find all email communication regardless of sender, receiver, project, department, subject or date no system but one manages: Email-Manager™.

Every email entering or leaving the exchange server is kept as a verbatim copy that is searchable by anyone. For privacy reasons, each user can hide personal emails from the search-engine or groups of leading employees can keep a project undercover by ACL. Also, emails can be assigned to any keyword you might think of.

Things are simple when you have the right tool.

Contact us for a web-demo – it’ll be worthwhile.

Are corporate emails valuable?

Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n²). First formulated by Robert Metcalfe in regard to Ethernet, Metcalfe's law explains many of the network effects of communication technologies and networks such as the Internet and social networking.

Having said that, I think we all can agree on Companies need to be better in sharing corporate emails. Of course you have to make some rules about how and what to share, but the acceleration of value to the Company from sharing the knowledge that recites in the Company volume of emails will surprise you. Metcalfe’s law is quite simple if the number of nodes (n) is zero the value to the Company is zero.

Maybe it is too simple to use Metcalfe’s law towards the use of emails in a Company or is it?

Should I be afraid of sharing my emails?

Well…. let’s face it.

We are all a little protective about our privacy when it comes to emails.

The main reason is that we receive a mix of private and business related messages in our inbox. Also, the email “lingo” tends to be casual, we crack jokes and we might not write as organized as we would do in a classic business letter.

Even so, we exchange information with customers via email that is vital to the business. This includes all kinds of commitments; such as price quotes, order confirmations, etc.

With this in mind, we understand the value that is associated with sharing emails with colleagues. We understand that it makes our company work more efficiently. We understand that the time it takes to locate information decreases significantly. We understand that we can service our customers better and faster.

Despite all of these significant benefits, you will probably ask yourself if an email collaboration system will jeopardize your privacy.

I know exactly where you’re coming from.

In my mailbox I receive a lot of information that is private or even confidential. I receive a monthly notification about my salary transfer, I exchange confidential information with my CEO, I exchange information with my wife, etc.

How can I make sure that my colleagues can take advantage of the emails I exchange with my customers – while at the same time protecting my privacy?

Believe me: We discussed this potential dilemma long and hard when we started to develop Email-Manager™

We needed to make sure that emails exchanged with customers were shared automatically – whilst private emails were being filtered out. We also wanted to make sure that this filter did not become a manual process, as these takes time and tend to be forgotten.

We actually managed to develop a method that does exactly that – and this part of Email-Manager™ is probably what makes is most unique.

Believe it or not: You get all the benefits of email collaboration AND you get to keep the private stuff private!

This intelligent filter engine gives you the following advantages:

• Emails that you exchange with business contacts are automatically arranged in so-called email “journals” - one journal per email address.
  
• The emails that your colleagues exchange with the same email address will be added to the same journal, so that everybody can see the shared email correspondence.
  
• If some of these email addresses are linked to a parent company (as you see in a CRM system), Email-Manager™ can automatically group all the journals that belongs to a specific company. This will allow you and your colleagues to have all the relevant emails exchanged with a specific customer in one place.
  
• Private emails are filtered out so that only you can see them.

There are many systems on the market that offer these benefits using manual or semi-automatic means. Where Email-Manager™ really differentiates itself (and this is a huge advantage) is that these things happen automatically.

The security filter mechanism is fairly sophisticated – and can even figure out how to handle potential conflicts such as:

• Your spouse works for one of your customers and everybody needs to see the email exchange – except the emails that he/she sends directly to you.
  
• Everybody has access to a specific customer email journal, but if your CEO sends an email directly to the CEO of that company – only the management team has access to the email.
  
• Etc.

Since you can create your own security filter “rules” that suits your specific business needs, the list goes on …..

So – in conclusion – do not be afraid of sharing your emails when you have an intelligent privacy filter!

In my next blog entries I will dig more closely into how the filter works from a technical standpoint.

Do you use email?

The answer to this question naturally is yes from all companies and organizations. However, the next question, »How?« is anything but mundane. The trouble is that most companies still use and file emails in a random, unstructured and manual manner – even 15 years after emails became a part of company communication.

It has escaped the attention of the managements in many companies that vital information is embedded in emails. It is paramount to address the problem because companies may face serious penalties or miss business opportunities if this behaviour continues.

Companies have put a lot of effort in streamlining the ordinary work processes, which typically are imbedded in advanced and automated production- and finance systems. Emails, on the other hand, are filed in relatively arbitary folders with the users and email servers: and everything is done by hand.

The users create folders and copy the emails themselves. We probably all can recall a situation where we have placed an email in a ‘wrong’ folder and how time consuming it was to find it. Equivalently, it is an almost impossible task to get a general view of several employees’ communication with a certain customer.

Inbox overflow
Another typical situation occurs when a user receives the standard “your inbox is full”- message. Emails have to be deleted – but which rules for deletion apply? Too often, the largest emails and the ones with attachments are deleted.
This is parallel to telling the employees to get rid of the their filing cabinets because they were taking up valuable office space.

Companies and organizations have to consider the importance of the contents of the emails with the same seriousness as finacial key figures, customer relations and – equally important – business contracts. Usually, contracts are written on paper, whereas changes and addendums are negotiated via email.

The key to success is to merge the email handling with the IT systems and to automate the filing process. Naturally, this means that companies have to implement business logic with respect to the handling of emails: The sooner the better – because increasing demands from government and business partners require email reliability from you. The EU are currently in the process of passing a strict version of the Sarbanes-Oxley law. And lately, court rulings have used email correspondance to rule against companies.

Lost opportunities
The above indicates that companies may loose business opportunities because inefficient collaboration between IT systems. However, by including email management in the business logic, companies will experience their users can work together in a more efficient and intelligent manner. The employees also will see new possibilities once the emails have been organized and systematized.
This is a wake-up call for all companies: email management is paramount. Early adopters will gain substantional advantages to reap the market.