Users are losing confidence in e-mail servers and
struggling to find the information they require to conduct
day-to-day business.
Standard e-mail servers are fantastic at messaging, but they are
completely inadequate at storing information. Microsoft has been
promising a relational database to provide information management
for Exchange since 1998, but, in 2005, that promise appears no
closer to realisation.
Yet the need for such technology is becoming critical:
organisations simply cannot afford to lose the valuable business
information that is either regularly deleted or takes too long to
find in an unsearchable format.
If organisations globally are to leverage the data held within
e-mail, it needs to be stored in a fully retrievable, auditable and
searchable manner. And, critically, this must be done without large
storage overheads or the need for user intervention.
A store-everything policy is the only answer to long-term
compliance and corporate knowledge management. Relying on manual
profiling once again puts too much pressure on the end-user to make
the right decision and takes too long. By automating and storing
every e-mail the onus is removed from users to understand long-term
information value and organisations can demonstrate their
commitment to regulatory compliance.
Once every e-mail is stored within a relational database
structure, organisations will have rapid access to this key
corporate asset. By integrating the e-mail data store with core
applications, from CRM and finance to HR and ERP, e-mail related
information can become an automatic component of the product,
providing the complete enterprise information view for the first
time.
By using a relational database e-mail management product
alongside existing mail servers, organisations can not only unlock
vital business information but transform the process of e-mail
management. Leveraging the efficiency of the relational model
overcomes the conflict between retaining all e-mails and escalating
storage costs. By modelling e-mails in a purpose-designed
information store, the process becomes extremely efficient.
Firstly, attachment duplication is overcome by single instancing
all documents, a process that reduces e-mail storage volumes by
half. Secondly, with most data falling into the "write once, read
many" category, appropriate information management reduces the
management overhead to only those e-mails that have changed each
day - a fraction of the overall volume.
By significantly reducing the e-mail volume organisations can
then provide users with unlimited mailboxes and rely on technology,
rather than business people, to solve the storage issue. This
approach moves the business away from the crazy situation where
end-users have to make the call on whether or not to delete
enterprise information, while also enforcing the compliance
strategy.
Once in place, a full text search can be undertaken across the
entire e-mail data store, achieving in minutes what has taken weeks
or months of manual investigation in the past. From compliance
assessments or investigations for e-mail misuse to tracking
customer-specific communication, fully searchable e-mail
information transforms the discovery process from expensive
nightmare to standard business tool.
It seems extraordinary that despite massive investments in
integrated technologies, e-mails languish unread across businesses.
Indeed, the approach to storing e-mail has not changed since its
initial acceptance a decade ago. Yet e-mail servers' hierarchical
storage mechanism makes enterprise searching impossible -
attachments are locked under message objects, creating massive
storage problems and, since the proprietary data store is available
only to the messaging engine, line-of-business applications cannot
access information.
And the cost to business is huge: from the time wasted by users
trying to find information to lost sales opportunities, an
inability to demonstrate compliance, and the massive overheads
associated with spiralling storage costs and e-mail management.
The traditional approach to e-mail management is not working -
it is time to challenge the old model and bring e-mail into the
enterprise information store.
Sean O'Reilly is director at e-mail archiving specialist
Aftermail