Taming the Beast: Gaining Control of E-mail
The headlines tell the tale: High-profile prosecutions hinge on the contents of e-mail messages that their authors never dreamed would constitute a permanent record. Beleaguered IT departments spend weeks combing through voluminous files to produce messages required for legal discovery.
But beyond the evening news lie more mundane challenges caused by the explosive growth of e-mail: performance degradation of e-mail servers; mushrooming storage requirements; the recognition that messaging systems have become the primary means of business communication; and that those messages contain critical enterprise information.
In most organizations today, e-mail management is either non-existent or is done using in-place technologies—like simple backup systems—that fall short of what is needed to protect the organization and to ensure compliance.
The Three E-mail issues
There are three primary issues associated with e-mail, each imposing a series of requirements on an e-mail management solution: e-mail as a source of corporate records; e-mail as a source of business-critical information; and e-mail growth as an IT headache.
#1. E-mail as a Source of Corporate Records.
A record is any piece of data, in any form, that is required to be kept as documentation of an organization’s decisions, actions and transactions. Clearly then, e-mail messages are records and must be controlled and managed according to an organization’s policies and procedures for record retention, access and disposition. To reduce the enormous costs of producing e-mails for litigation discovery and audits, they must be categorized and searchable. Much of the recent visibility of e-mail is a consequence of the emerging importance of e-mail as a source of corporate records.
#2. E-mail as a Source of Business-Critical Information.
E-mail is increasingly recognized as a source of corporate information and companies are looking for ways to manage it as they do other business-critical content. Industry analysts endorse this strategy, recommending that their corporate clients look for solutions that integrate e-mail with other content and look to enterprise content management (ECM) vendors as providers. This integrated approach enables retrieving all the records related to a particular customer or transaction—purchase order, invoice, correspondence, e-mail—with a single query and viewing them together. #3. E-mail Growth as an IT Headache.
The explosive growth of e-mail has overloaded e-mail servers and degraded system performance and reliability. Messaging servers were designed to be mailrooms, not file rooms. The requirement is to offload e-mail from production servers to maintain system performance while continuing to make them easily and efficiently available to users, auditors, compliance officers and management.
New Solutions for E-mail Archiving
The new generation of e-mail management solutions goes beyond earlier, more limited products that provided simple backup and offloading of e-mail stores and products that left it to each user’s discretion to decide which messages to retain.
Today’s products are designed to address three primary requirements:
- Retain messages in compliance with regulatory requirements and corporate policy;
- Facilitate searching as required for legal discovery; and
- Improve system performance.
These products automatically capture, classify and index e-mail messages, create a searchable archive and manage the information lifecycle according to corporate retention and disposition rules. Offloaded to secondary storage to improve the efficiency of the e-mail system, the archive remains accessible to users, auditors and compliance officers. To meet today’s requirements, make sure you choose a solution that allows you to:
- Capture everything you need—but only what you need. That means taking the decision on which messages to retain out of users’ hands and automating it according to rules you establish. It also means capturing only the messages that meet your criteria. You should be able to screen on subject, sender, recipient, message content and date. Make sure you can store attachments with messages and avoid duplicating messages that are sent to multiple recipients.
- Establish flexible, automatic classification based on business rules and content analysis. This is a logical structure that can be organized by user, by chronology, by organizational function or by some combination. The classification system can also assign codes that determine length of retention and disposition.
- Maintain accessibility for users, compliance officers and corporate managers via the e-mail client and a Web-based interface. Retrieval should be based on categorization and/or full-text search of messages and attachments.
- Implement an e-mail management software infrastructure that supports multiple storage options, including emerging network-attached storage from vendors such as StorageTek, Network Appliance and EMC.
- Seamlessly integrate with your plans for implementing a sound information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy that will allow you to manage all types of information from creation to disposition.
Mobius’s ViewDirect E-mail Management meets these criteria for supporting regulatory compliance, facilitating legal discovery and improving system performance. It also enables integrating e-mail with other enterprise content to maximize the business value of the critical information contained in e-mails.
Mobius is the leading provider of software solutions for total content management. The ViewDirect® TCM suite includes integrated e-mail and records management as well as facilities for Web content management, business process management, and content integration across the enterprise