by C. Roy Payne

This issue of The AccuView - delivered to you, as always, via e-mail - focuses on effective e-mail management. Of course, I acknowledge and appreciate the irony in that statement. As we deliver The AccuView to your inbox once a month, we realize that we're contributing to the daily volume of 171 billion e-mails sent worldwide. Once it reaches your inbox, what happens to this e-newsletter next is likely up to you. We hope you read The AccuView and gain valuable insight from the articles we've included. But who or what governs what happens to this e-mail after you've read it?

In the plethora of e-mail retention articles written by industry analysts and experts, one piece of sound advice remains consistent: take e-mail archiving out of the hands of employees. However, despite this popular suggestion, over 60 percent of organizations still leave e-mail retention up to individual users. As reflected in the recent AIIM survey results below, e-mail management is still lacking sophistication or is nonexistent in most organizations.

The good news is that most companies will have more than one problem that can be solved with e-mail archiving. Some of the benefits include regulatory compliance, litigation support and storage management, which facilitates ease of e-mail archival and retrieval enterprise-wide.

We hope this issue of The AccuView gives you a glimpse into the world of e-mail capture and compliance - highlighting both the necessity for and the benefits of effective e-mail management. If your organization falls into the 62 percent not effectively managing e-mail, we can help you make a change for the better. Contact us to discuss your needs and requirements.

Best regards,

C. Roy Payne

roy.payne@accuimagellc.com

Take a look at your e-mail inbox right now … go ahead, see how many e-mails are in your inbox. 100? 500? 2,000? 4,000? Are all of the e-mails organized in a manner that allows you to easily find what you want? Or are just a scattered few of the most important e-mails catalogued in a folder? What about colleagues' e-mails that could be pertinent and valuable to your organization?

There are too many e-mails to start with and, when you add junk and spam e-mail to the equation, actually managing the flow of information through an organization's e-mail system is a daunting task. And there is no doubt that the most important form of digital communication today is e-mail. In some respects, due to the fact that e-mail is a written communication that can be saved and tracked, it may be THE most important form of communication for your organization.

But it's not managed that way.

Approximately 171 billion e-mails are sent every day (Q1 2006), with spam messages accounting for 70 percent of the traffic, according to the Radicati Group, which tracks these statistics. Although about 120 billion messages are spam and viruses, genuine e-mails are sent by around 1.4 billion users. And this number is growing exponentially. The number of active mailboxes is estimated to go from 1.4 billion active mailboxes to 2.5 billion mailboxes by 2010. That's almost doubling in the next four years.

Being able to effectively navigate through these messages and separate, save and catalog the messages that contain valuable corporate information is becoming more and more crucial, to the point that it cannot be ignored. Not only is the loss of valuable organizational information and knowledge at risk, but security, legal and regulatory compliance must be considered as well. E-discovery is a term that is going to be heard again and again, and e-mail is going to be a key area for organizations to be concerned about when protecting themselves.

What To Do Now

Smart management of e-mails is now necessary from a corporate and government perspective, as there is simply too much valuable information being transmitted … yet all in the midst of billions of unnecessary and non-pertinent messages.

So, how should it be managed? What can we do? To figure this out, an organization needs to figure out what their real end goals are for an e-mail management solution.

E-mail management should be viewed as crucial to any organization's knowledge management initiatives - right from the start. Organizations need to capture, assign, share and retain information about correspondence received and sent, and will want to make sure this can be done as easily as possible from the end user perspective.

Goals of an Effective E-mail Management Solution

• Easily share valuable organizational information
• Make information more accessible
• Seamless integration with the e-mail client
• Ease of use for the end user to save time, not create more work
• Ensure compliance with legislative and corporate requirements
• Secure e-mail/information management
• Easily separating out "junk" e-mails from the valuable e-mails
• Managing e-mail attachments just as easily as the e-mail itself

An e-mail system must be able to easily integrate with your corporate systems and applications, and it must be easy to capture and store e-mails in a central location. Ease of use for the end user is also critical; despite the ever-growing influx of e-mail, saving time and creating efficiencies in managing the information is still possible and is ultimately crucial in effective e-mail management. The system must also be effective in managing the security of the information as well as handling compliance with any regulatory or legal requirements. And, as e-mail management is a subset of correspondence management, a system that can manage information on paper as well as electronic correspondence within one unified system makes good business sense.

In short, any organization has the potential to be overwhelmed with managing a growing amount of correspondence, but a proactive plan and an effective system will make the difference - as long as it is a top priority as of yesterday, not tomorrow.

Source: KMWorld

The amount of unstructured data found in any enterprise, coupled with the management of this overwhelming amount of valuable information stored in an unstructured format, is a major challenge facing many businesses today. While some organizations have begun to address the management of unstructured content on a departmental basis, focusing on specific applications like the imaging of checks and loan applications or a portal for electronic sales literature, most organizations have ignored the benefits of using ECM (enterprise content management) across the enterprise. Those businesses that have not begun to address the problem of how to handle the management of their unstructured content and electronic records will only continue to allow what is currently a major problem to become even more unwieldy over time.

Recent research estimates that the annual growth rate of unstructured content - i.e., documents, e-mails, images, audio, video and web-based information - is anywhere from 65 to 200 percent per year. It is estimated that each individual user in an organization will create about one gigabyte of unstructured information in a typical year. According to Ferris Research, the number of non-spam e-mails sent and received weekly by a typical business user is somewhere around 600. Overall unstructured information accounts for approximately 80 percent of a company's total data.

While the management of unstructured information is an important consideration for organizations, ensuring that users are able to find the right information in a timely manner is just as important. In a new report entitled "Enterprise Search and Retrieval" published by the Butler Group, Europe's leading IT research and advisory organization, it is suggested that the time spent by employees searching for the information they need to do their jobs can cost employers up to 10 percent in salary expense. If you consider that required information can be stored in many different locations in an enterprise such as network shares, local hard drives, or in user e-mail accounts, and frequently there is no standard method to manage how and why this information is saved or purged, it is easy to understand how the cost of finding required information can be so high.

Given the struggles that organizations face in storing, managing and finding relevant unstructured information, it is no wonder that ECM software is considered to be the next wave in the enterprise software space. ECM software, already a $3.2 billion business, is one of the faster growing areas of IT and, according to leading research firms IDC and Forrester, it is expected to continue to grow at an annual rate of between 13 and 19 percent.

Many ECM solutions started out as systems to manage traditional documents with some imaging capabilities, and the most common feature of ECM applications was the large amount of data each system managed. Over time, however, most of the leading ECM vendors added more robust capabilities such as workflow, search, e-mail management, web content management, records management, digital asset management, content integration functions, taxonomy (categorization) and compliance management.

In particular, compliance management is an important consideration in the adoption of ECM in many organizations. The initial driver in this area was federal legislation like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which resulted from the numerous cases of corporate malfeasance over the last few years. A 2005 survey conducted by AIIM found that compliance was the fastest-growing business driver of investments in ECM technologies. Still, the market opportunity for ECM products and services driven by compliance continues to be robust as evidenced by a survey done by AIIM in August 2006 that reported that over 50 percent of survey respondents still described themselves as being at a very early stage in considering compliance requirements.

One of the bigger problem areas in most companies' attempts to stay in compliance with current federal regulations continues to be the management of electronic documents and records, in particular the management of e-mail. In certain instances, the federal government dictates the rules to be put in place for e-mail and electronic records retention. For example, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission requires that financial services firms retain broker e-mails for three years, and HIPAA says hospitals and doctors must keep billing records and authorization forms for six years, and other patient data, including e-mail discussions of a patient, for the life of the patient. However, aside from such specific rules as these, most companies leave e-mail retention up to individual users or simply apply a standard one-size-fits-all approach to e-mail retention; the risk to this approach can be very high. A 2004 survey conducted by the American Management Association found that 20 percent of survey respondents had employee e-mail and instant messages subpoenaed in the course of a lawsuit or regulatory investigation and 13 percent of survey respondents reported that they had fought a workplace lawsuit which resulted from employee e-mail-related issues.

A story in the June/July 2003 issue of Law Office Computing reported that the average cost for electronic discovery is $.23 per page. When considering the 600 e-mails sent/received per week by the typical office employee, the e-discovery tab for only one week of e-mails at a 100-person company is $13,800. In the wake the $1.45 billion e-mail mismanagement judgment returned against Morgan Stanley in 2005, it's alarming that more companies are not being more proactive about managing e-mail.

Those organizations that have completed ECM implementations have mostly reported positive ROI. According to a 2005 study conducted by AIIM, over 70 percent of surveyed business leaders believed their ECM implementations met or exceeded expectations. The positive results experienced by so many companies adopting ECM is further evidence of the overall benefits of ECM.

AIIM predicts that many companies that had selected and implemented ECM systems for specific departmental requirements will be taking a step back and recognizing that ECM should be looked at as an enterprise-wide need and those companies will look at ECM as part of the company's overall IT infrastructure investment.

Source: TechLINKS

Organizations are drowning in a torrent of e-mails, which brings with it spam, viruses and other security threats. At the same time, many organizations are being asked to retrieve archived e-mails on an almost daily basis, to comply with litigation issues or regulatory requirements. Yet, surprisingly few organizations have even the most basic form of e-mail management in place to cope with these demands.

It cannot be presumed that employees realize the implications of deleting e-mails, or even which e-mails need to be retained, and this task must not be left in their hands.

"The alternative to e-mail management tools is to leave it to individuals to decide, which is of questionable value," said Chris Harris-Jones, principal analyst at Ovum. "Some people will think that all e-mails they receive are important, while others will delete everything." He recommended that organizations operate a written e-mail policy stating which e-mails should be kept and for how long. However, he warned that managing e-mails manually was fraught with difficulties.

E-mail management tools are becoming vital in protecting organizations against the threats posed by the misuse and mismanagement of e-mails. Such products not only ease the pressure on e-mail servers and storage media, they can provide valuable information on the content of the e-mails being sent out of the organization, and flag it up to an administrator if it breaches company policy.

"When choosing an e-mail management tool, the first thing it should have is a mechanism for capturing e-mails. Then it needs a mechanism for analyzing the value or context of an e-mail - with 50 percent of all e-mails being spam, it is unlikely that organizations will want to keep them all," said Harris-Jones.

There is a multitude of e-mail management products, from standalone offerings that provide any aspect of security, archiving, auditing, searching, storage, policy management or lifecycle management, to those that offer several of these functions in a variety of combinations. One way to distinguish them is by supplier background. Harris-Jones split them into suppliers with a background in archiving and those coming from a content management perspective. However, he acknowledged that this distinction is disappearing as products and company mergers blur the lines.

Organizations that already use content management software probably have the easiest option when choosing a product. "If a client asks us about e-mail management, we first find out if they do content management already, as they can then just buy a software module, which is usually a lot cheaper and easier to maintain, as it is a single piece of software," said Harris-Jones. For those who do not have existing software, product choice will depend on why and how often an organization needs to access e-mail archives.

Sue Clarke, senior research analyst at Butler Group, separated e-mail management products into three categories: security, policy management and lifecycle management, which includes archiving.

• Security should be the first point of reference. Security products, such as anti-virus and spam filtering tools, are an absolute necessity for any organization that uses e-mail.
• Policy management systems meet the requirements of regulations by providing sampling capabilities in addition to blocking or amending noncompliant material. They can ensure that information leaving the organization is compliant or is not contentious, and that unsavoury information does not enter the organization. They can be set on an ad hoc basis to search e-mails entering and leaving the firewall by keyword, date and so on.
• Lifecycle management includes e-mail archiving products and records management systems that support the archiving of e-mails, enabling organizations to find e-mails in response to litigation or requests from regulators. Most also have the ability to set retention periods, automatically deleting e-mails once the specified period has elapsed.

Businesses need to consider how e-mail is being used throughout the organization. With such an array of possibilities and different combinations when choosing a product, it is best to simply write down a list of requirements and match them to the functionality of each product. Clarke advised users to think about what they need to do to not only protect their e-mail systems from a risk perspective, but also to know the value of their e-mails from a strategic viewpoint.

Source: ComputerWeekly

AccuImage, LLC is a systems integrator that empowers their customers with solutions designed to gain the maximum value from their information at every point in the information lifecycle. Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, AccuImage specializes in the design, installation and support of document and content management systems, forms processing solutions, and electronic workflow systems. The company offers hardware and software from leading companies - AnyDoc Software, Böwe Bell+Howell, Canon, Captaris, Captovation, EMC Documentum, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Kodak, Kofax, Panasonic, Plasmon and Verity - as well as consulting, document conversion and professional services.

AccuImage, LLC addresses the Daylight Savings Time change policy and their supported software products

It is the position of AccuImage, LLC to convey that our products are minimally impacted by this policy change due to the time value dependency returned by the underlying deployment software stack (OS, database, application servers, etc) upon which the products run. As a result, your content management and imaging systems deployment environment in US time zones will only be affected if you are running older versions of the OS, database, and other application platform software that have not been updated to comply with the DST changes.

Please refer to the Preparing for daylight saving time changes in 2007 article on Microsoft's site for information. In that article, the Supporting the DST changes on Windows operating systems section has information and links to updates and utilities to accommodate this change. All workstations and servers that have the Microsoft Windows DST patch applied should experience no issues with our content management and imaging products. Currently, there is not a patch available for download for the Windows 2000 (Professional/Server) Operating System. Per Microsoft, it is out of Mainstream Support.

From Microsoft:

“Customers who have an Extended Hotfix Support agreement for Windows 2000 should contact their technical account manager for information regarding the availability of a hotfix to update the time zone tables under Windows 2000 Professional and Server editions. Although the registry structure for time zone information is largely identical between Windows 2000 and Windows XP, and the Windows XP hotfixes may appear to successfully update Windows 2000, customers who choose this method of update do so at their own risk and Microsoft cannot provide technical support. Customers with Windows 2000 systems are advised to create their own tools to perform the required registry updates. The registry changes for the December 2006 and March 2007 transitions can be found here. The registry changes for the October 2007/2008 and March 2008/2009 transitions will be published at this location shortly.”

For a manual workaround, please review Microsoft KB Article 914387.

In addition to Microsoft products, Sun’s Java Runtime Environment (JRE) should also be up-to-date as the JRE is responsible for all DST calculation and formatting in some of our supported software packages. Please see the article published by Sun for further information U.S. Daylight Saving Time Changes in 2007.

Please contact AccuImage, LLC if you have further questions regarding the DST impact on your AccuImage, LLC supported products.