Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

The Intelligence Behind Email Patterns

Researchers recently discovered some astonishing corporate email patterns when sifting through Enron's publically available email database. While they expected to see elevated chatter during moments of crisis, they found that email volumes picked up significantly more than a month before the company's downfall was common knowledge.

They also noticed that, as stress builds within a company, employees start talking directly to the individuals that they feel most comfortable with, which means they stop sharing information widely. Rather than hammering out long email threads with multiple recipients, this research shows that employee correspondence quickly becomes one-on-one emails to their most trusted colleagues. That is, in the midst of a pending crisis - these individuals form "cyber cliques" via corporate email.

Why is this important? The study suggests that email patterns can serve as an early warning sign of growing discontent within an organization. According to Ronaldo Menezes, one of the study's researchers, "Human resources folk would probably find this extremely useful."

This research only starts to hint at the value of having an email archive. By storing all of your email in a central, searchable repository, you can unearth important trends - sometimes without even looking at the contents of the email.

• Managers can monitor email communications with key clients to ensure proper follow-up and make sure that your customers are being treated appropriately
• Sales managers don't have to miss a beat if one of their sales representatives leaves since their email history can be quickly transferred to another rep
• Human resources can ensure that employees are using email appropriately (i.e., devoid of profanity or sexual innuendo) and address potential problem employees proactively (there's something to be said for ye ole sentinel effect)

Curiously, none of these are usually cited as reasons for adopting an email archiving solution. But given time, perhaps they will. I think part of the problem here is that the term "email archive" is a bit of a misnomer as it connotes an impenetrable vault (i.e. a place where emails go to die). But in actuality, email archives are active repositories where messages can be easily searched and retrieved on-demand. In today's information-centric world, email archiving goes way beyond just storing emails and meeting regulatory requirements - it's an organization-wide tool for increasing efficiency.

Email archives can unlock valuable company information and expose trends. This information, in turn, can fuel better customer service, improve the use of email as a professional communication tool and perhaps even foreshadow a coming crisis.

If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Join ’Em … VARs Consider Benefits of SaaS

Whether you're drinking the Kool-Aid or shrugging off software-as-a-service (SaaS) as the latest fad, it doesn't appear to be going away anytime soon. In fact, according to an estimate from the leading industry analyst firm Gartner, SaaS (also known as cloud computing) will jump from $46.4 billion in 2008 to $150.1 billion in 2013.

As more and more companies begin to adopt SaaS, value-added resellers (VARs) must also consider the switch. But the decision is a little more challenging for VARs. First, SaaS requires VARs to completely change their business models, which is no easy feat. Some VARs also feel that SaaS threatens control of their customer relationships. And finally, the SaaS model takes longer to realize profitability, taking VARs from low-volume, high-margin products and services to high-volume, lower-margin sales.

On the upside, however, the quality of earnings with the SaaS model is higher with more predictable, recurring revenues. In addition, although the types of professional services VARs offer may also require some changes with SaaS, there is still a great deal of opportunity to provide value. Data conversions, project management, change management, training, system integration and software customization are still high-demand needs that offer tremendous business value. It's also important to recognize that VARs have a big opportunity to add value to up-and-coming hybrid approaches, for example, LiveOffice's partnership with Mimosa and Microsoft's software-plus-services model.

In the end, VARs need to be flexible and provide solutions their customers want and need. SaaS is a big player, especially in a down economy, and it's getting easier to sell as more and more customers begin to understand it and adopt it. So take notice, VARs, and decide where you see the future of your business. But as Francis Bacon said of innovation, "He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator."

Tweeting Financial Advisors? FINRA Rules Apply.

Anyone who was around the financial services industry in the early 2000's when registered reps and brokers started using email for business remembers the great debate - "What will FINRA say about email?" Today, there's a new question - "What will FINRA say about Twitter?"

Leave it to great tech writer Davis Janowski (@ddjanowski)of InvestmentNews to clear up FINRA's take on tweeting. According to his recent article, "FINRA doesn't believe it's appropriate to make special rules for each new communication tool that becomes available."

"We are very interested in accommodating new technology, but the challenge is to have rules that are both specific enough to address current issues, but broad enough to accommodate evolving technologies and future developments," said Thomas Pappas, FINRA's vice president and director of the advertising regulation department in Rockville, Md. "If we were to write a rule that addresses something too specific, say Western Union telegrams, it wouldn't have taken long before that rule was deemed obsolete," he said.

That means, in order for reps to keep their tweets on the up-and-up, they'd have to be archived and potentially pre-screened (just like websites and emails), which as one of the story sources observes -basically removes the spontaneous nature of social media (i.e. the whole point) from the equation.

Like I said, great article that answers a question many of us in the industry are asking. Certainly there is no question that new technologies pose compliance risks. Here's my take - we weren't sure how we were going to deal with websites back in the mid-90s, we also weren't sure what would happen with email and IM in the early 2000s, but we figured it out (necessity is the mother of invention, right?). Now another communication method is out there - and it's up to tech vendors like us to figure out what we need to develop in order to make Twitter another tool in the quiver of financial services professionals (and all organizations, for that matter).

Game on.

Testing out Twitter? Follow me at @adugdale (recommended if you like celebrity gossip mixed w/ tech observations) or follow our company @liveoffice (recommended if you're interested in finding out what's going on at our org).

*Edit

Check this out: Great blog post on Twitter and Compliance from Doug Cornelius (blogger & CCO at Beacon Capital).

Abracadabra – Emails Begone!

We've come to the point in which it's no longer a surprise when emails just magically vanish from their respective environment. As reported by The News & Observer here, this has happened yet again as James Oblinger, the former chancellor of N.C. State University, had lost six months of high-priority correspondence. These emails have recently become relevant to litigation pertaining to how Oblinger allegedly helped to create a job for First Lady Mary Easley that involved an 88 percent pay increase in one year.

John Woodward, the university's interim chancellor, takes the stance that the university's retention policy calls for the emails to be deleted and that the data wasn't manually removed. N.C. State is now bringing in forensic technicians to determine whether or not any of the data can be recovered.

I'd say that this is all the more reason to have an archiving solution in place while maintaining appropriate retention policies. Granted, if you're in a regulated industry you're generally only required to keep your email for a certain length of time. But would it really hurt to cover all of your bases by keeping it longer? If you've got nothing to hide, you're only protecting yourself and potentially eliminating concerns stressed by potential accusers.

After all, wasn't it just a week ago that I blogged about a similar topic? Raise your hand if you're beginning to tire of emails that vanish faster than David Copperfield. At least in this case, Oblinger didn't opt for the Tyrell S. Drew hand drill method.

The New Deal: Proactive Email Archiving

It used to be that email archiving was relegated to just financial services companies which were required to archive their email due to regulatory compliance requirements.

But, increasingly, companies of all stripes are discovering its other advantages.

As our inboxes get clogged and our email servers bloat, many organizations are turning to archiving to ‘prune' their on-premise email stores and regain their system's performance. Email archiving solutions solve these storage management headaches by offloading email storage to the cloud or to an on-premise solution.

But, increased email volumes have also resulted in the courts shining a brighter spotlight on email communications. The growing cost of e-discovery, compounded by new regulations such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), has changed the way businesses must deal with email. When email becomes evidence, the ability to quickly search all historical email provides a competitive advantage.

In a recent article on SearchStorage.com ("Email archiving needs soar as e-discovery requests rise"), organizations are deploying email archiving solutions just to be proactive. Miami Country Day School, for instance, has no pending lawsuits and no pressing need for e-discovery capabilities. "But, Donna Lenaghan, the private school's director of technology, said she wanted to be proactive as soon as she learned of the legal requirements through an education technology journal."

Miami Country Day School still hasn't had occasion to use e-discovery capabilities for legal discovery, but they are still getting value out of the archive by providing end users access to their own personal archives. Now, their end users have the tools at their finger tips for locating and restoring inadvertently deleted emails. In the past, ferreting them from backup disks might have taken a day or more.

"It's a very handy day-to-day operation tool," said Lenaghan. "But it's also a peace-of-mind insurance policy if you have a legal issue."

And for organizations who go the hosted email archiving route (vs. opting for an on-premise solution), they can get up and running in hours - not weeks or months. In fact, Lenaghan didn't even consider an in-house email archiving product, because the school's four-person IT staff already has a full plate, with 1,000 students and staff members.

For many resource-strapped IT departments, like Miami Country Day School, the incremental benefits of getting relief from spiraling email storage costs, being able to quickly respond to e-discovery requests, and allowing end-users to restore lost or deleted emails is the icing on the cake. And it's this "icing" that is increasingly putting email archiving at the top of their priority lists.

Hybrids: On-premise and Cloud-based Email Archiving with Mimosa

As some folks know, I previously spent several years in the on-premise email archiving industry.  And while I'm now an unabashed fanboy of cloud-based technologies, I've been in both worlds long enough to realize that each model has its trade offs.

On-premise archives provide a number of unique benefits including:

• Tight integration with internal systems
• Complete control for IT
• Archiving of other internal content sources beyond email (e.g., file servers)

In contrast, cloud-based email archiving offers:

• Limitless storage and indexing leveraging the economies of scale of the cloud
• Flat, predictable pricing
• Secure, external access for reviewers

Many customers gravitate fully to one camp or the other.  But we are seeing an increasing number of clients interested in achieving the best of both worlds to address a couple of key challenges:

• Managing cost to store an ever growing volume of email driven by longer and longer retention periods
• Automating export and review of responsive content to parties outside of the company 

To this end, today we announced the BETA availability of LiveOffice CloudMerge for Mimosa NearPoint, an integration with our friends at leading email archiving vendor Mimosa Systems.

CloudMerge for Mimosa NearPoint automatically pushes some or all of the data from the on-premise NearPoint email archive to LiveOffice's secure cloud-based archive on a regular basis.

This integration, detailed here, gives customers two key benefits.

Benefit 1: Tiered Storage to the Cloud

Older email messages can be aged off of the on-premise archive and stored securely in LiveOffice's cloud-based email archive.  In this way, the cost and size of the on-premise archive storage can be capped while maintaining easy access to your content, thereby:

• Providing an alternative to new on-premise storage purchases
  
• Automating migration of data between storage platforms as data ages in the archive
  
• Leveraging the unlimited storage pricing model of LiveOffice's archive

Benefit 2: Secure, Open Review through the Cloud

A subset of records can be transferred securely from the on-premise archive to LiveOffice's cloud-based email archive.  This eliminates the need for manual exports and shipments from the on-premise archive and allows outside counsel, legal partners or any outside reviewer to search and iterate on a subset of the data in the archive.

For example, imagine that I receive an e-discovery request from outside counsel. Without this solution, I would have to spend time manual exporting the initial data set and copying it to a DVD before shipping it to the requestor. There would likely be subsequent requests to modify the search criteria so I'd have to repeat the export and shipping process again and again. But CloudMerge changes that process entirely. Now, I'm able to seamlessly move each desired data set from the NearPoint archive to the LiveOffice archive on-demand. The requestor is provided with a login and password and is able to access the data set almost instantly (without ever gaining access to my network) and perform their own customized searches.  

For more, please check out this page.

Huge thanks to our partners at Mimosa Systems for their collaboration on this venture.

Network Admins Plugin to Email Archiving

Our team has always believed that the masses should have access to the many  benefits that email archiving offers, from streamlining mailbox management to enhancing end user productivity. Today, we're making good on this belief by launching the first-ever email archiving plugin on the Spiceworks platform.

Over the last few months, our engineers have been working to build a plugin (some call it a widget) that can be easily downloaded and instantly deployed by Spiceworks's community of more than 700,000 IT professionals. This development is significant in the email archiving space, here's why:

• We've boiled down the email archiving deployment process to a five-click installation - bear in mind that traditional on-site deployment often takes weeks and/or months
  
• We've streamlined the journaling process - you can get up and running in minutes with no intervention from our sales team
  
• We're providing Spiceworks users with 5 free archiving accounts (unlimited storage) - we stand behind the benefits of email archiving and want folks to experience them first-hand without making any kind of commitment

In order to get the plugin, you:

• Download the Spiceworks IT Desktop
• Install the plugin from the plugin section of the Spiceworks Community

After journaling has been configured, a pie chart (like the one above) displays the number of emails archived per user as well as some helpful stats about email storage.  We encourage you to plugin to our email archiving and let us know what you think!

WANTED: Intern W/ Handyman Exp – Must Love Email and Power Tools

A couple of summers ago, that could have been the advertisement posted by the Democratic Department of Information Technology in Mount Holly, part of Dauphin County, for an available internship position. 

While many of us talk about our coffee-getting and other entry-level adventures as interns - one took his position as something entirely different. As recent documents reveal, House intern Tyrell S. Drew spent his days erasing computer hard drives and destroying email backup tapes that would later become relevant to the attorney general's investigation into the legislative payroll scandal.

The tools of Drew's trade included a hand drill and a large magnet - both of which are devastating to the delicate nature of a hard drive's internal components. Is it fair to fault an intern for such actions? After all, he was presumably nothing more than an unassuming community college student in search of work experience - and he was only acting on orders from his superiors. It's quite possible that he didn't realize what he was doing was wrong.

But as the regularly-appearing headlines tell us, entire cases now hinge on the admissibility of electronic records (like emails and attachments). These headlines also serve as daily reminders that our government bodies aren't immune to the trials and tribulations brought about by the never-ending influx of data.

This just goes to show you that all organizations need to have some sort of system in place for preserving electronic records.

An Email is Worth a Thousand Words … or Maybe Even More

Let's be real - in the era of electronic communications, emails are often newsmakers. These days, it's not uncommon for a series of emails to be THE main source for news writers. Take for example a recent CNNMoney.com headline that declared, "Email shows Fed strong-armed BofA." As Bank of America (BofA) CEO Ken Lewis prepared to appear on Capitol Hill last week, this reporter had obtained recently-released emails that "... detail the pressure the Fed put on BofA to complete its merger with Merrill Lynch."

In a single set of emails, we learn:

• "Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke had suggested to another Fed official that ‘management is gone,' if BofA managers tried to flee the deal and later on needed further government assistance."
• "Bernanke called BofA's threat to pull out of the deal a ‘bargaining chip,' saying ‘we do not see it as a very likely scenario.'"
• "Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker said that Bernanke considered Bank of America's threat to pull out ‘irrelevant' and ‘not credible.'"

With all that has transpired as a result of our nation's current financial crisis, I imagine this is only the first of many emails that will be analyzed and chronicled by the media. It's also strange to realize that in the decades to come, many of these messages and articles will likely be re-read by our children and grandchildren as they report on the 2009 Economic Crisis to their teachers and classmates.[i]

Or, perhaps only folks who work at archiving companies ponder such things? ;-)

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[i]Dugdale, Amy A. "An Email is Worth a Thousand Words ... or Maybe Even More." Weblog post. LiveOffice Blog. 17 June 2009. 17 June 2009 http://blog.liveoffice.com/.

Even Google Is Addicted to Outlook

In my various wanderings, there seem to be two categories of people in the business world:

1. The people that believe that everything-Microsoft is dead, including all Microsoft-related email technology.
   
2. The 100 MM+ silent majority of us that still can't live without Microsoft Outlook.

While I think gmail is a revolutionary concept, product and business that will dramatically change the world of collaboration, I also know that Outlook isn't going away any time soon.

Apparently, Google agrees.  Today, they announced Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook.

Per Google's blog:

Many business users prefer Gmail's interface and features to products they've used in the past. But sometimes there are people who just love Outlook. 

Our thesis has been for some time that many customers want the simplicity of management, unlimited email storage and powerful search found in systems like gmail combined with the Microsoft look and feel and integration.  Good to see Google feeling the same way.

Who Says You Can’t Live on a Cloud?

It's amazing to me how far technology has come in the past 15 years. At the risk of embarrassing myself, I admit I was a late bloomer when it came to technology. I made it through college using a Brother word processor, which consisted of a typewriter and a pseudo-computer screen with lovely green type, and I thought it was pretty cool. I didn't touch a computer (a very old Mac with a tiny, nine-inch screen) until my first job, and that was more than daunting. Then there was this thing called email, another foreign anomaly in my young professional life. It wasn't long after my introduction to the computer and email that I got my first cell phone, one of the largest known to man. I don't even think I used the Internet until the late 90s. But that was then ...

Today, I couldn't live without my computer, email, the Internet and cell phone technology. In the early 90s, I never would have imagined I'd be working in the tech industry, pitching the benefits of HP wares before finding myself in this burgeoning industry called "cloud computing." But I am a firm believer in the benefits of technology, and the sky is the limit - literally.

Cloud computing isn't just a fly-by-night operation. I believe it is the new wave of the future. And it makes perfect sense. If you look at the history of technology, innovators have always found ways to make things more efficient, reduce costs, expand features and simplify functionality for end users. Businesses are looking for ways to achieve the same things, especially in a down economy, and cloud computing is the right solution, delivered in a convenient and customizable package, where the possibilities are endless. More and more companies are building their mobile workforces and allowing staff the option of telecommuting, so providing employees with the flexibility to access information anytime, anywhere is a good thing for everyone.

But you don't just have to take my word for it. Leading industry analyst firm Gartner predicts that cloud computing will jump from $46.4 billion in 2008 to $150.1 billion in 2013, and many of the big guys are taking notice - Microsoft, HP, IBM and SAP, to name a few.

Remember when the Internet was destined to fail? There will always be naysayers, but I think cloud computing is here to stay. We've only begun to scratch the surface of the next big thing technology has put at our fingertips.

More smart phones (iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre) = more dumb email

While Barack Obama and I relentlessly cling to our Blackberries, I'm sure both of us are equally-impressed with the pace of innovation in the smartphone market.

From the Palm Pre announced last week to the iPhone 3GS unveiled today, it seems like the market for Internet-connected phones is flipping on its head every quarter.

And with every release, it's more and more clear that the money today is in business users and specifically in better support for Microsoft Exchange.

It's all very exciting to watch.  But from our seat in the email archiving world, millions more email-enabled mobile devices means billions of additional email messages to store, retain and search.

And I don't know about you but "Sent from a [] handheld" often means that the sender didn't have much time to think about that message before sending it.  It will be interesting to see what percentage of E-Discovery requests five years from now are related to messages of increasingly-questionable judgment sent from increasingly-"smart" phones.

Digital Voicemail: Convenience or Compliance Risk?

While convenient new technologies seem to emerge by the minute, compliance departments are continually plagued by the challenges they present. More than ever, many closely regulated industries are under a microscope-especially financial services. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) expects its member firms to have policies and procedures in place to "monitor all electronic communications technology used by the firm and its associated persons to conduct the firm's business." Although email has been the primary focus of such regulations to date, more and more new technologies are coming into play.

So where does digital voicemail fit in? The short answer: digital voicemail is discoverable, and you should be prepared to handle it no differently than email when it comes to compliance.

No matter what type of voicemail system you have, the way the associated data is retained is likely under your control, which means it must adhere to your data backup and retention polices. Although unified messaging solutions are convenient, often delivering voicemail message notifications and audio files directly to your email inbox, they tend to pose the most challenges when it comes to retention and discovery. Some regulations, such as amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, specifically callout "sound recordings" and specify that they must be reasonably accessible and not burdensome to produce (see FRCP Rule 26 and Rule 34); however, more and more courts are not accepting accessibility or financial burden as an excuse for failing to provide relevant data during discovery (see eDiscovery & Compliance Considerations with Unified Messaging).

Unfortunately, very few companies are prepared for discovery of digital voicemail and other audio files, which could end up costing them a significant amount if they end up in litigation. When it comes to discovery, it's only a matter of time until voicemail and other audio files are just as common as email communications. Whether you're prepared or not, your compliance obligations are expanding. Companies must ultimately assess their own risk and determine the best course of action to meet their specific compliance needs, but a little preparation goes a long way.

The Cyber Tea Party of 2011?

Visions of my U.S. history class in high school are coming back to me - "No taxation without representation" and so on and so forth. These flashbacks are courtesy of New York Times' blogger Tom Kuntz whose recent idea of the day was - "A tax on e-mail would stem the deluge of spam - and both free up and help pay for the bandwidth that the Internet needs to grow."

To be fair, the idea was proposed by Edward Gottesman in Prospect, a British magazine. His argument is that taxing emails would result in a drastic reduction in the amount of spam we receive. Fair enough - he maintains the funds could be used "to finance the expansion of bandwidth that the Web desperately needs." And let's face it, bandwidth isn't cheap.

While I must admit that it's an interesting idea, I can already envision the revolt now. Frustrated self-employed and small business owners throwing their computers out their office windows in protest ... ok, maybe that's too far-fetched. But I can only imagine the heated debate that would emerge if email were to be taxed. I guess the best I can do for now is grab a cup of tea and see what happens next.