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.

RSS feeds on emails - A Manager's dream?

When I first heard about RSS feeds on email journals for a contact or account, my first thought was something like "What good is that?". But after having used this new feature of Email-Manager, I'm getting more and more convinced that this is the best thing that ever happened for a manager or someone who want's to know what's going on with you customers without having to browse through hundreds of emails.

Imagine this: You know that one of your important accounts are having problems and you have passed the case on to Service and Support - At that point it is really out of your hands and you have to rely on support to report back to you when problem is solved.
Now being a control-freak like me, you want to be updated on how things are going with the issue at your customer, but you are either out of the office, busy in meetings or just generally curious on how support is handling the case.

With the new RSS feature you can subscribe to the email journal for that specific account and as soon as support and the customer exchanges anything via email, you will get a copy of that specific email in your own mailbox, even though you are not copied on the email when it was send.

This just gives you a whole new level of control and a giant leap in improving the way you service your customers.

I am exited and this feature has been received extremely well with our customers too who use it for added control where you usually was left in the dark.

As one of our customers said: "It's the Blackberry of SharePoint".

A recorded demo of this feature can be seen here: http://emmdownload.com/video/rss/part2/

Welcome to the email management blog!

Welcome to our new blog.

Our plan is to publish postings over the coming months that discuss various aspects of email management.