By Steve Ranger, 24 June 2005 01:05
NEWS Companies are failing to manage their email systems correctly - but just throwing more technology at the problem is not the answer, according to one analyst house.
Analyst Butler Group said many large organisations are asked to retrieve old emails on an almost daily basis, either because of legal action or for regulatory purposes.
But senior executives still fail to realise email can be dangerous if used improperly.
"It cannot be assumed that employees realise the implications of deleting emails, or even which emails need to be retained, and this task must not be left in their hands," warned the analyst group.
Most problems arise not because of the content of the emails but because companies are unable to retrieve the emails within the timescale demanded, the analyst claimed.
A lack of basic management functionality in email systems compounds the problem, the analyst claimed in its report, Email management vendor solutions.
Butler Group senior research analyst Sue Clarke said: "Organisations must turn to a combination of technology and business policies to manage the problem."
The analyst groups email options into three sectors: corporate email systems; security and policy management; and email lifecycle management.
"Unfortunately, there is currently no single vendor that provides a complete email management solution. Organisations will need to implement products from more than one category to achieve total email management," the analyst house warned.
It also said organisations should examine the business reasons behind the problem and to investigate the business implications of any proposed email management solutions.
"Any solution should include implementing business policies as well as technology products," it added.
Comments
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1. anonymous
One problem with email solutions may be that most people are unaware of the vast variety of alternative email clients available besides the usual Microsoft software.
There are email clients (such as MailCOPA) which are written specifically for business solutions and provide multi user access to all emails. They also provide search facilities to locate all emails correspinding to a topic.
2. Nolene Sherman
Email can be a business record and as such needs to be included in your company records management program. The problem with most IT solutions is that they want to treat email as a discrete class, when in reality it is just another means of creating a record.
Would you buy a program that promised to to control all your Excel documents. Then another that would control your Word docs? Would you treat all word processing documents the same, keeping them all --say -- 90 days? No .. it's the content (subject matter) of those documents that determine how it should be indexed and how long it should be kept. Email is absolutely no different. The email client is just another word processor.
Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS) for the most part can handle e-mail. Employees just have to be trained to recognize what is and what is not a business record. They already regularly do this with their WP documents -- or perhaps they don't, in which case the company has a bigger problem than just email management!