Capture and Archive your Email To Reduce Costs  

Expert Opinion

 

Ziad WAKIM, VP Solutions EVER TEAM

Email itself has developed to become one of the most important and common means of business communication today. Increasingly used to send and receive purchase orders, contracts, proposals and other important documents, a typical corporate user sends and receives around 30,000 emails each year. This means that that a growing proportion of an organization’s business capital is now stored in email systems.  

Numerous studies have been conducted concerning the legal, social and ethical implications, and the usage of email communications that dramatically changed many aspects of one’s professional and personal life.In one of the surveys where approximately 120 managers were asked  about the reasons why they needed to search and retrieve old emails, the top reasons were:

  1. To access business information and locate business records
  2. To recover deleted emails
  3. As part of an internal HR requirement or investigation
  4. For compliance purposes and legal discover
  5. Other

While nearly two-thirds of organizations think that archiving emails is important and necessary, however, less than one- third has actually implemented a solution. This is because of the difficulties related to managing the large and growing volume of emails, the growing storage costs as well as the difficulty to adapting it to the underlying corporate rules and regulations. While users often require instant access to email content regardless of its age, email administrators continually struggle to maintain high service levels while simultaneously enforcing retention and disposition policies that protect an organization.

Email management solutions present major information management challenges and risks for organizations. Key challenges identified are:

  1. Volume of email: The pervasive growing volume of email and the increasing size of email attachments, make managing this significant volume of information stored on servers rather difficult.
  2. Enterprise Filing plan: Classification and categorization of email messages and attachments in appropriate classification plans, in which all related electronic records can be managed, regardless of their source.  
  3. Rapid e-Discovery: allowing auditors and legal staff to quickly perform sophisticated search and discovery across centrally managed email information to meet compliance requirements.
  4. Employee implications: Involve employees in building up and completing the enterprise filing plan; for many information workers, email client is their primary business application on which they spend many hours writing and responding to incoming emails. These employees must be empowered with tools that allow them to seamlessly and easily contribute their emails without additional efforts, reducing change management and increasing end- user adoption.
  5. Email versioning: Difficulty to manage email history created by the different email responses and various interactions. Versions management, access controls on emails messages, email attachments and email metadata are all specific record management functionalities that should be taken into consideration.
  6. Legal requirements: Proactively manage email content for litigation and information governance, while constantly adhering to business policies that include retention and disposition, strictly determining policies for compliance and legal holds. Etc... 

With the continued rapid growth of email globally, organizations cannot take a wait-and-see approach to email capture and archiving when there is so much at stake legally and financially. The decision to implement a critical solution can no longer be postponed.  Email Management and archiving solutions offer a variety of functions to easily and seamlessly capture, archive and retrieve e-mails. Some of the most common benefits that these solutions bring to an organization include :

  • Seamless, on-the-fly message classification based on the message type and values, by automatically extracting email attributes and attachments. 
  • Reduced information management cost and increased user productivity, by providing seamless access to email information. 
  • Ensure litigation by applying and enforcing retention policies and ensuring accessibility.

In conclusion, the careful preservation and archiving of e-mails and their attachments by organizations should not be considered as an isolated problem. A more efficient approach would be to incorporate email archiving into a general records management and archiving strategy. EVER TEAM, the EMEA leader in integrated Enterprise Content Management Solutions, leverages more than 20 years of expertise and innovation in this field to provide EverSuite Email Management, an extension to its EverSuite Content Management Solution, designed to simplify the integration between Microsoft Outlook and the ECM repositories. With an emphasis on empowering business users with content from enterprise repositories, it allows them to store, archive and find emails in just a few clicks, from the comfort of their Outlook application, in compliance with legal, organizational and cultural requirements.

Ziad WAKIM, VP Solutions EVER TEAM