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.