Email: No Longer a Lightweight Communication Tool

• Simplified compliance: The discovery of email and other pertinent information is critical in potentially saving law firms and their clients thousands to millions of dollars per case. Customers from law firms generally agree that when they need to uncover important electronic data, email search is a quick, easy and effective way to find exactly what they're looking for. Peter Szymonik of Technology Advisory Group, LLC states: "We use X1 to go through mountains of client data and to extract relevant litigation data, especially from emails."

A Call To Action
Why do we search for information anyway? For most of us it's because we are trying to complete a project or task. We search for data a co-worker sent us, or to complete a proposal for a new customer. We look for a datasheet from marketing to answer a customer's question. We promote an email from a prospect to a lead in our CRM system. The list goes on, and for every search there is a corresponding activity we are trying to complete.

Search, even on the Internet, is about finding a piece of information that allows us to complete a project. The best email search programs take action into consideration, making it easy not just to find information, but to do things with it. Actions can be as simple as opening a file, or as complex as initiating a workflow on a corporate application, such as a document management system. The common denominator is that the email search program makes it easy to identify information, and the actions make it easy to do something with the results. Michael Gale at Gartner sums it up: "Our consultants are using email search (from X1) on their individual desktops. The productivity improvements have been outstanding mostly in the email indexing area. It is not only finding the information, it is being able to rapidly act on it."

When evaluating email search, it is important to make sure that any program you consider has thought as much about why we search as the search itself. Things to look for that show the designers have your productivity in mind include:
1. Support for direct actions, like replying, forwarding and changing the status of email messages;
2. Support for selecting more than one message and applying a single action to all messages at once;
3. Support for dragging and dropping results into other applications;
4. Support for direct actions which integrate with important applications like document management systems or customer relationship management systems; and
5. Support for your technology staff to extend and customize the program with actions that matter most to your staff.

The best email search products are designed to make you, and your staff, more productive. By integrating into the work processes of your employees, email search delivers on this promise.

What Are You Waiting For?
Email search changes the way you and your co-workers keep up with the flow of information. New technologies are making great email search affordable and easy to use. For early adopters like Alfred Hsi, director, Global TMT Knowledge Management at Deloitte Consulting, the results are remarkable. Deloitte workers experienced a 25% increase in productivity. Says Hsi, "We have the interdependent ability to fulfill requests quickly...we can now find information 90% of the time." With new advances in search technology making a huge difference for companies like Deloitte, isn't it time your company investigated adding powerful search to your email and messaging system?

With IT in Mind
X1 is an end-user productivity and money-saving solution. But the company has unique benefits for IT managers. X1 is for you if you:
• Are concerned with the proliferation of insecure, consumer-oriented desktop search tools in your environment;
• Need to provide a secure way to remotely access key files;
• Can't keep up with users' need for information access;
• Are responsible for data security, and need to make sure that as search makes data more accessible, security is not compromised;
• Ultimately bear the brunt of litigation requests, especially pertaining to email, and you need a tool to help quickly and thoroughly conduct discovery;
• Are concerned with ease of deployment; and
• Need an effective way to scale a desktop search solution.