With inboxes full to bursting, companies are finally looking at the
question of e-mail best practice. Jane Dudman spoke to five IT
directors about their approach
E-mail is causing real logjams in corporate IT systems. The figures
are stark: one recent survey - for Essential Computing by the
Research Group - estimates that in a company with 150 e-mail users,
managing e-mail is the equivalent of one full-time job. The real
problem is that much of this overhead is hidden: 44% of people are
in charge of deleting and managing their own e-mail, with no
central control over whether their actions meet legal requirements.
Until recently e-mail was not being handled as a corporate
responsibility. But that is changing rapidly.
As e-mail levels continue to grow, IT managers are attempting to
rein in this ad-hoc approach to e-mail management. Some experts are
urging them to look at ways to solve the problem, and at the role
of e-mail in the business as a whole.
"People are beginning to think much more carefully about how they
handle e-mail," says Monica Seeley, founder of Mesmo Consultancy
and author of a recent book on the subject. "But most people are
starting at the technical end. They know everyone is overloaded
with e-mail and that e-mail is not being organised properly, so the
knee-jerk reaction is to look at different technical strategies.
Most people have chosen their e-mail software with little thought
about what they want to achieve with e-mail within the business."
Seeley says there are signs that, as a result of e-mail overload,
companies are finally beginning to look at the whole question of
e-mail best practice and how to use e-mail as a business tool.
There are many options for IT managers who want to tackle their
e-mail overload, but there is no single right answer to the
problem.
Store e-mail data
Supermarket group Somerfield has 59,000 staff and generates about
70,000 e-mails a week. With almost all of the retailer's commercial
agreements with suppliers now agreed electronically, it is vital
for the company to maintain accurate records of all e-mail-based
communications to protect the business against any potential legal
disputes. In addition to this, Somerfield also needed to deal with
the sheer volume of e-mail staff effectively.
"If we keep only paper-based contracts, we are losing 90% of our
records," points out Colin Clark, corporate cost audit manager at
Somerfield. "This was a critical business problem we needed to
address."
One thing the company did not want to do was to simply increase the
size of its e-mail system. "We did not want to just throw more
servers at the problem," says Gordon Scholes, the retailer's IT
director. "That would be treating the symptom, not the cause, and
would not help us index or retrieve individual e-mails."
Somerfield has bought KVS' Enterprise Vault e-mail management and
archiving system, which provides structured storage and retrieval
capabilities for e-mail files. Enterprise Vault captures all
e-mails and stores them on a central NT server. The system works
with any storage system, including magnetic and optical discs and
storage area network systems, and can support multiple Exchange
servers. It leaves a small stub in the Exchange e-mail system,
reducing e-mail storage requirements, and providing a fully
searchable centralised store of information.
This has already proved its worth at Somerfield, when one of the
company's managers was able to find, in seconds, within Enterprise
Vault an e-mail for which he had been searching for three months.
"This is invaluable," comments Clark. "The big benefit to us is the
corporate governance aspect. This system means we are protected; we
have a full record of all our communications."
The biggest drawback has been the realisation, following
implementation of the new system, that a more thorough e-mail
strategy needed to be put in place. "We realised that our external
e-mail usage was bigger than we had ever expected and this has
forced us to look at our overall policy," says Clark.
Curb e-mail use
Insurance firm Talbot Underwriting has 100 staff, all of whom use
e-mail as an integral part of their daily business operations. This
has pushed e-mail traffic up to about 4,000 messages a day. The
real problem is not the daily e-mail traffic, however, but the
number of e-mails being stored, with users holding up to three
gigabytes of data in their inboxes.
"When we first realised we had a problem, we did the obvious
things," says David Watson, group IT manager at Talbot
Underwriting. "We had to limit the size of the server, because it
was filling up and the fuller it got, the harder it was to
maintain. This was creating serious business exposure for us,
because e-mails these days are the lifeblood of our
business."
Watson and his team decided on a common strategy in this situation:
they imposed limits on users. "We imposed mailbox quotas," he says.
Users received e-mail notifications telling them their inboxes were
filling up and that they would not be able to send or receive any
more e-messagges until they had deleted some of their existing
stored e-mails. The standard storage allowed per user was
2.5Gbytes.
How effective has the policy been?
"It does not work," admits Watson. Users do not delete e-mails,
they just store them away in their own personal archives. This is
not a structured approach to storage; it is not a reliable form of
back-up and it makes it difficult for users to find files they may
want to look at later. In addition, if a member of staff leaves,
there is no guarantee they will not have deleted their files, so
there is no overall corporate control of the storage. "It is not a
manageable approach if you need e-mails retrieved quickly," he
says. "Imposing quotas is not really a business strategy. We did it
as a short-term solution."
Talbot Underwriting has now installed an e-mail archiving system
that has met all its needs.
Shift traffic to other systems
One way around e-mail overload is to shift users into other ways of
working, such as using groupware and collaborative software
systems. This has been technically possible for some time, but
changing ingrained patterns of working has proved hard.
Premier Oil, which has a turnover of £263m, began implementing Open
Text's Livelink collaborative software three years ago to make it
easier for staff across the company to share information. It was
also looking at the growing problem of e-mail. "The problem we have
with e-mail is not just overload, but knowledge management," says
Hugh Banister, Premier Oil's global IS manager.
Growing use of e-mail across the company has meant valuable
business information and contractual details being stored in
inaccessible e-mails, rather than being available to the company as
a whole. "We were just haemorrhaging information," comments
Banister.
Premier Oil plans to stem this loss by automatically loading
e-mails with important business content into the Livelink system.
But this process has not been easy. Open Text does not provide an
automatic link between Outlook and Livelink. This link is now being
provided by a third party, and the system is being tested before
being rolled out.
Banister is confident that this aspect of the system will work well
but he is having less success in persuading users to shift from
e-mail to using the collaborative features in Livelink. "People are
used to e-mail," he says. "If they want to start a conversation,
they tend to do it by firing off an e-mail, even though the
technology is there to run threaded conversations within Livelink."
One way to try to alter people's habits is by changing the Livelink
interface, so that it looks more like Outlook. "That would provide
the best of both worlds," says Banister.
Outsource e-mail management
Many firms do not have the internal resources or the inclination to
run their own e-mail system. Financial services firm Cedef, which
has 25 staff in London and a further 50 in Switzerland, used to run
its own e-mail, but found the ageing system was becoming an
increasing burden on its limited internal IT resources.
Cedef opted to outsource its e-mail and has chosen a service from
Netscalibur, explains Rehuel Loots, Cedef's network manager. "The
main reason for outsourcing our e-mail was for security and
back-up," says Loots. With only a single systems administrator
working in Cedef's London office, the firm felt outsourcing would
provide a reliable service, heading off the problem of how to
maintain cover when that person was sick or on holiday.
Netscalibur provides its Managed Exchange 2000 service over a
virtual private network, with 128-bit security, which Cedef feels
provides a higher level of security than similar services from
other suppliers. The system enables Cedef to add new users and
domain names when necessary, and while there are some changes to
the interface now that users access their e-mail via a web page,
Cedef says these changes are very slight and have not resulted in
any disruption to users.
In terms of the service itself, Cedef is making no significant
financial savings from its move to an outsourced service, says
Loots. "The cost is almost the same and in the long run may even be
a little bit more," he comments. "But we would need someone on-site
to run our e-mail, so the outsourced service is actually
cheaper."
The company pays £15 a month per user for its e-mail service, which
has now been running since October 2002. There were a few initial
problems, mainly with Cedef's own set-up, such as the way the
wireless area network connection was set up in the Swiss office,
which had to be sorted out.
The service has resulted in some changes. "If there are files with
very large attachments, the download can be a bit slower than
before," says Loots. "But there is no significant impact." A bigger
issue has been user sign-on. "Previously, users just opened their
e-mail and authentication was done on our local network. But now
users have to type in their password every time they open Outlook.
In the beginning they did complain about that a bit but it is more
secure."
Sidestep e-mail altogether
One of the biggest problems with e-mail is that it gets used for
all kinds of business communications, some of which could be done
differently. One company using different technologies to sidestep
e-mail is online security software firm Entegrity. With its head
office in California and offices on the US east coast and in
Windsor, Berkshire, Entegrity ran into problems using e-mail as one
of its main internal communications tools.
"Sometimes you just need to ask a colleague a quick question.
Although e-mail may be the obvious way to do that, not only do you
then get an inbox full of e-mails - most of which are no more than
two lines long - but it can also mean delays," says Ian Hendry,
director of Entegrity's European operation.
The company has turned to instant messaging. It uses AOL's
internet-based Instant Messenger as a way to keep information
flowing internally, as well as to customers and partners. "One of
our partners might be on the phone to their customer and they need
to check something like licence details," he says. "To do that,
they type the query on the screen and get an instant answer."
There are many different instant messaging systems. Entegrity opted
for the AOL system because it has business ties with the internet
giant. The software, which is available as a standalone system, is
free.
There are drawbacks. Unlike e-mail, nothing is saved, so there is
no audit trail, although it is possible to do a screensave. But
Hendry says this is not the point of instant messaging. "It is not
enormously secure, but we see this as a just a quick way to answer
questions that are not business sensitive," he says.