The Layers of E-mail Management
In recent years, we have seen e-mail's progression to the primary mode of communication in today's interactive business world. The average employee processes over 75 e-mails per day, totaling over 2.8 billion messages sent and received daily in the United States alone. This exponential growth of e-mail data stores—and enterprise dependency on e-mail—will continue to grow, and become an increasing corporate management issue.
E-mail has become an integral business tool used to maximize productivity. At the same time, it presents significant risk for organizations because it is not properly managed. The informality of e-mail exchange in everyday corporate communication presents various challenges such as managing the vast number of messages as well as ensuring that these messages can be used effectively and efficiently as an information resource.
Over the past 30 years, e-mail systems have evolved from a simple tool used to facilitate individual communication into a global network supporting hundreds of millions of users. At the same time, the content of e-mail has changed, maturing from the exchange of simple text messages into the sharing of unstructured content, including documents and image files. E-mail systems operate outside of business applications and departments, cutting across traditional boundaries in an organization. Storage requirements and the vast networks of e-mail servers will continue to expand, while IT budgets dwindle.
The growing e-mail management problem needs to be addressed fundamentally—from the ground up. Different kinds of e-mails need to be retained for different periods of time; the challenge lies in identifying the important e-mails, separating them from the unimportant ones, and determining an appropriate retention period. Considering the "content lifecycle" introduces another important aspect of e-mail management—what is done with e-mail after it has been processed. The content lifecycle of e-mails can be differentiated into three different phases:
- Active Phase: During the short active phase, people work with the information contained in the e-mail; they respond to e-mails and create e-mail threads.
- Reference Phase: During the reference phase, e-mail content is retrieved from the file store as required.
- Evidence Phase: During the evidence phase, e-mail is primarily used to address regulatory concerns—an e-mail is a business record and must therefore be retained for the same time period as any other record in the same classification. Retention (and disposition) policies can be purely internal, or imposed by an external regulatory body.
To determine if it is at risk, an organization needs to determine how its e-mail messages are stored, how they are managed and whether management and storage methods comply with relevant external regulations and internal governance policies. More information: www.opentext.com/kmworld/email
The E-mail Management Framework
When choosing an e-mail solution for your organization, Open Text recommends its "E-mail Management Framework" that is based on a three-tier functionality. Each level of the framework provides distinct capabilities designed to address the varying challenges introduced by the explosion of e-mail in enterprises.
Storage Functionality. The storage functionality focuses on archiving, enabling organizations to migrate e-mails and attachments to more cost-effective media.
Having adequate storage capabilities provides an infrastructure that connects e-mail offerings such as Microsoft Exchange/Outlook and Lotus Domino/Notes with a storage backend. This integration unloads the e-mail message store to a more efficient and scalable archive repository, without sacrificing content accessibility. The central archive store not only ensures efficient operation of the e-mail system, but also provides long-term storage, remote standby scenarios for data security and high availability scenarios for data availability. This ensures compliance with document archiving standards existent in most regulated industries.
The storage layer provides the foundation for a sustainable e-mail management strategy. Users can continue to work with e-mail in the way they are accustomed, while server performance and long-term preservation of e-mail content are assured.
Manage Functionality. The manage functionality of this framework extends the storage layer to support legal discovery processes and structured retention management of all e-mails within an e-mail system. The archival capabilities of the storage layer are enhanced with classification, indexing and search functionality.
- Full Text Search—Information retrieval capabilities based on a proven search engine.
- Journaling—Journaling capabilities are coupled with a powerful records management backend, which enables centrally captured information to be used for records management purposes.
- Retention and Disposition—Organizations need to be able to retrieve e-mail documents at a moment's notice and manage the process of their destruction when it is legally permissible to do so. The manage layer provides the ability to control both the retention and destruction of e-mails.
- Auditing—Powerful auditing functionality tracks actions that are performed on objects in the archive repository. An audit trail identifies and describes the type of operation performed on the item, the date and time of the operation and the user who performed the operation.
- Legal Discovery—The manage layer fully supports legal discovery processes by utilizing indexing, searching, offline exporting of search results and auditing capabilities.
Comply Functionality. The comply functionality enhances the platform with customized solutions specific to regulations such as SEC 17a-4 or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, using functionality from both the storage and manage layers of the framework.
Adhering to the internal policy is only the beginning of e-mail compliance. Across many industries, e-mail communication is increasingly coming under scrutiny from regulatory agencies, such as the SEC and NASD. Organizations compelled by such regulations are required by law to preserve important messages in their original form, and make them available to auditors for review on demand. In highly regulated industries, such as financial services, this is a particular concern that carries significant penalties for non-compliance.
Open Text Solutions
Open Text recognizes the challenges that corporations are facing today. We provide an integrated solution for managing, tracking and storing e-mail to enable compliance with corporate governance and other legal requirements. Having combined forces with IXOS, Open Text can now provide powerful records management and e-mail archiving functionality. The integration of robust active-archiving with the proven records management platform provides unlimited archiving and off-loading capabilities.
Store: Livelink for E-mail Archiving
Livelink for E-mail Archiving provides content archiving capabilities for organizations concerned with the increasing cost of e-mail servers and the risk of losing important content because employees are forced to delete e-mails to comply with corporate mailbox size restrictions.
Manage: Livelink for E-mail Monitoring & Livelink for E-mail Management
Livelink for E-mail Monitoring provides a robust journaling solution for archival and retrieval of e-mail content within an entire organization. Livelink for E-mail Management comprises all of the LL for E-mail Archiving functionalities but also offers integrated and interactive E-mail classification thanks to the seamlessly integrated records management backend.
Comply: Livelink for SEC17a-4 Compliance
Livelink for SEC17a-4 Compliance provides a framework to address the e-mail monitoring requirements for dealer brokers as mandated by SEC regulations. Not only do firms under scrutiny of SEC regulations need to capture all e-mail communications of their dealer brokers, but they also need to provide regular audit activity across the captured e-mails. Livelink for SEC17a-4 Compliance includes out of the box journaling, sampling and workflow capabilities, providing an established best practice for e-mail compliance in a single package.
E-mail management was originally a storage issue for IT departments. But as court decisions increasingly deem e-mails to constitute corporate records, the e-mail management challenge becomes a worldwide corporate issue. The key is finding an e-mail management solution that provides an easy-to-understand framework to store e-mails efficiently, manage e-mails as business records within the e-mail clients users are accustomed to and to build solutions that comply with specific regulations.
Jens Rabe joined IXOS in January 2003, when the company acquired Obtree. In his role as Segment Manager for Open Text's and IXOS records management and e-mail archiving products, Jens is responsible for implementing Open Text & IXOS' product strategy to deliver solutions that meet customer requirements and managing the lifecycle of Open Text and IXOS products.
Open Text™ is a market leader providing enterprise content management (ECM) solutions that bring together people, processes and information in global organizations. Throughout its history, Open Text has matched its tradition of innovation with a track record of financial strength and growth. Today, the company supports more than 17 million seats across 13,000 deployments in 67 countries and 12 languages worldwide. Open Text has been for inclusion chosen in KMWorld's "100 Companies that Matter in KM"—March 2005 Issue.
Tom Jenkins is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Open Text, a market leader in providing enterprise content management solutions that bring together people, processes and information in global organizations. Jenkins has served in a variety of technical and managerial positions at computer hardware and software technology intensive growth companies during his career including design engineer, sales manager, general manager, chief operating officer, president, CEO and chairman. Jenkins is the author of "Enterprise Content Management, What You Need To Know," published in October, 2004.
For More information visit: Open Text.