Posted by Amy Dugdale on Wed, Mar 11, 2009 @ 01:23 PM
In a recent New York Times
article, Farhad Manjoo offers some insightful tips on how to keep an empty inbox (or just a few email messages). While I realize this is just a pipe dream for many, I'm here to tell you I'm living it, and it's awesome.
What's my secret? As any good tech vendor should, we eat our own "dog food," i.e., we use our Mail Archive solution internally. All messages I send and receive in any given day are automatically stored in my "Personal Archive" folder in my inbox. Anytime I need an old message, I just click on the folder and search for whatever message I need.
Along with my cluttered inbox, a few other things are now history for me, including:
-
Mailbox quotas - that hated "Your Mailbox is Full" pop-up box no longer appears as the unfair referee in the midst of my daily barrage of sent emails (with "enormous"-as Outlook calls them-attachments)
-
Frantic calls to IT re. lost emails - while I adore our desktop support manager, in the grand scheme of his daily duties, he has no interest in helping me find a message I deleted or "lost." I have officially entered the world of email self-restoration, and it is paradise. (Julio - the next time I have a PC issue, I hereby publicly promise to hit restart BEFORE I call you)
-
Saving emails locally - gone are the days of the devious local PST file save. I'm no longer hitting any kind of quota, so I don't have to store messages locally (is that my legal department cheering in the background?), nor do I have to try and search them using my desktop search tool
While Manjoo's article raises many great points on better managing email and edging toward an empty inbox (a.k.a. sweet nirvana for us Type-As), there's one thing I've got to clarify. He recommends creating an Archive folder in your inbox (great idea!). For messages requiring no action or response from the recipient, users can quickly scan them and "then shoot them into your archive and forget them." Agreed. It's nice to quickly get messages out of your inbox and forget about them ... until you hit your quota and are forced to delete your archived messages. Unfortunately, that discarded email has now become the golden ticket in your quest to land a big deal, and it's gone forever.
But with Mail Archive, I've still got my golden ticket and an empty inbox, too. Can it get any better?
Posted by Nick Mehta on Wed, Mar 11, 2009 @ 02:57 AM
Phil Wainewright from ZDNet has, hands-down, the best
blog on
software-as-a-service (SaaS) out there.
As usual, he has a new and very insightful post today - this time on "freemium" business models.
Freemium, for those of you that don't know, is the idea that was first popularized in consumer services, where you allow a customer to use a free service and then enable them to upgrade to a paid service:
At the heart of a ‘freemium' business model is a notion that makes me viscerally uncomfortable: giving something away for nothing. Services are given away free in the expectation of being able to sell paid-for, premium services to a subset of customers later on. In essence, the free subscriptions are a marketing cost that is recouped once the premium services start to take off. Fair enough, but in the heady atmosphere of recent years, some people have driven this model to extremes. Twitter and Facebook are examples of what I would call the ‘lunatic fringe' of the freemium business model: enterprises that give away services without any preconception of how they'll eventually recoup the cost of acquiring and servicing those free subscriptions. From a business perspective, this surely is unadulterated folly.
Phil then goes to highlight several companies offering free business services as lead-ins to a paid service. Box.net is a personal favorite. I know the company well and am an avid user of the service.
We actually launched our own freemium offering last fall with LiveOffice Mail Continuity. In this service, we offer a completely free email disaster recovery service that allows users to view, send and receive email directly from Microsoft Outlook in the event that their internal Microsoft Exchange server is unavailable.
As I discussed previously, we launched this free service for two reasons:
- We think this is a great way for customers to pilot email "in the cloud" with minimal impact on their production email system. Indeed, we offer a free trial to test the free service.
- Once a customer is setup for this service (which involves a simple configuration change in Microsoft Exchange and provides an integrated folder in Microsoft Outlook), there is literally no additional setup to move the customer to our paid email archiving service. So the customer simply has to sign a contract and agree to pay us, and we then retain the data based upon the customer's retention periods.
So for us, our freemium allows us to help potential clients, let them learn about us and give them an easy path to move to our paid service.
Posted by Nick Mehta on Mon, Mar 09, 2009 @ 11:31 AM
Microsoft announced a high-level schedule for delivery of its Azure cloud computing offering today:
More details on Azure, including pricing, should be available in the "coming weeks and months," Steven Martin, senior director of product management for Microsoft's developer platform, said in an interview. It's unclear when exactly pricing details are coming, but Microsoft plans to unveil new features of Azure later this month at its MIX Web developer conference.
While the announcement was filled with ambiguous "plans to" and "coming weeks and months," and (my favorite) "expected to," the impact of what they're working on can't be underestimated.
One of the key benefits of cloud computing is that it simplifies the infrastructure management problem that has plagued everyone in IT for so many years. Yet cloud computing, until now, has largely been optimized for the open source (e.g., Linux) application stack. For example, Amazon's EC2 web service is great for Linux but is, in our opinion, still pretty raw for Windows.
Yet, speaking from experience, the infrastructure management problem that cloud computing purports to solve is perhaps the most severe in the Microsoft Windows environment. Anyone that has had to reboot servers every few days knows what I'm talking about.
Hence, we're excited to see Azure when it's "expected to" be released.