Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

Quota management: You have better things to do!

David Sengupta on the Ferris Research blog has a great post on the time people spend managing email.

How much of your time do you spend moving email out of your inbox into Personal Folders (PST files in Microsoft Outlook parlance) to make sure your inbox stays under your email quota?  How much time do your users or employees spend doing the same thing?

As I've explained before, I believe filing and foldering is a concept from the paper world that was adopted into the electronic world (where do you think the name "file system" came from?) and grandfathered into the Internet world.

Unfortunately, with the volume of information we deal with every day, I firmly believe that foldering will prove to be unsustainable over time.  Google doesn't "folder" the Internet and the company that tried (Yahoo! with its directory) got passed by.

Regardless as to where you stand on that religious debate, foldering email to get under quota is definitely like the Whac-A-Mole game David Sengupta describes. 

As he says:

Why not work with the archiving vendors and move data straight to the archive instead of to myriad folders in the inbox? 

Well said! 

One search to rule them all

In email archiving, there are basically two strategies for capturing messages:

1. Capture everything OR
   
2. Capture everything that matches a certain criteria (e.g., email older than 30 days is "stubbed" out of Exchange)

Method 2 is great, is very popular with on-premise email archiving products and has a number of advantages.

However, one of the big disadvantages is that the end-user in Outlook has two repositories:

1. Email "younger" than 30 days lives in Outlook and is searchable by Outlook search tools
   
2. Email older than 30 days lives in archive and is searchable by archive search tools

The user now has to figure out how old the email is that he's looking for and determine which repository to search. In many cases, he or she may not know for sure and therefore would have to search both. Finally, the search semantics (e.g., whether the engine searches attachments, how search terms are constructed, etc.) may differ between Outlook search and the archive.

Some on-premise vendors get around this by integrating their archive into a desktop search engine (like Windows Desktop Search) and allowing users to search the archive and Outlook from the desktop search engine. The challenge is that many users don't have or use these desktop search engines.

One of the nice things about method #1 (capture everything) is that the user has one place to search and no confusion over where his or her email is. Again, it's a tradeoff, but this method (full disclosure - of course, the method that LiveOffice uses) may be more usable for some users.

Beyond the buzzword: SaaS and usability

Martin Tuip, on his Archiving101 blog, has a great post on the importance of usability in email archiving systems. I agree with him that the word "usability" is thrown around without much precision in the technology industry.

And with all of the immensely-"usable" products in the IT industry, we are stuck editing XML files and configuring registry settings through the dark of night. :)

I've always had a preference for the word "consumability" (yes I know - that's not really a word). We think of consumability as being a measure of the pain (or lack thereof) involved in customers consuming and getting value out of your technology.

Consumability goes beyond user interface and documentation and touches on the entire experience. From the wikipedia article above, this includes:

• Installation
• Configuration
• Maintenance
• Problem determination
• User experience

One of the beautiful and challenging things about software-as-a-service is that you are forced into consumability whether you like it or not.

At LiveOffice, as an example, we are serving 1000s of clients (small and large) and need to be very automated and predictable in the way that we deploy, configure and maintain our technology for our customers. If every customer involved a "man behind the curtain" tweaking config files, we'd be out of business.

Similarly, our users pay per month, so they expect value every month and demand a solution that they can actually use. One of the fundamental differences between an on-premise, licensed product and a software-as-a-service solution is that license vendors get paid for sales, while SaaS vendors get paid for usage.

Shelfware for on-premise vendors, while disappointing, is still money.

Shelfware for SaaS vendors leads to empty bank accounts.

Condolences to Randy Pausch's family and to us all

This has nothing to do with LiveOffice or email.

As you may know, Carnegie Mellon University professor and YouTube star, Randy Pausch passed away on Friday at age 47.

If you haven't seen his famous "Last Lecture" on "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," you should stop reading this blog and watch it now.  It's inspirational and changed the life perspectives of millions of people including your's truly.

The world lost a great soul on Friday.  But if any of us have 1/100th the joy in life and impact on the world as Dr. Pausch had in his last year, we should count ourselves blessed.

I wish sincere condolences and prayers for peace to Dr. Pausch's family. 

Email management: The end of folders?

David Ferris at Ferris Research has a great blog post on foldering versus search for email management.

It's interesting how my own use of folders has evolved over the years. Back at my first startup in 1998, I would file every email into very granular folders like the following that sat in my Personal Folders (PST Files):

Clients

A

Acme Corp.

ABC Corp.

B

Engineering

Marketing

I would even file "Sent Items" into the appropriate folder. Yes - I was pretty nerdy.

A funny thing happened once I started using an email archiving system (initially Enterprise Vault while I worked at VERITAS and Symantec and now LiveOffice since we are a small business): I decided that the amount of time I was spending simply dragging emails into folders was becoming non-trivial.

Like many folks, I get between 200 and 400 messages a day, and as such, email drag-and-drop was eating up time. And because I use an email archiving system, I don't have to worry about email quotas, so dragging emails out of my inbox is no longer necessary.

So I keep everything in my inbox and archive it off. When I need to find something, I search for it.

To me, with the increasing amount of information we receive every day, foldering as a metaphor (which, don't forget, came from our filing cabinet days :) ) will not scale forever.

I agree with Ferris' argument that foldering is still better in some cases since search isn't perfect, but for me, giving up foldering was a big time saver.

In defense of email

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, a few things seem to happen every year with certainty:

• Taxes
• Brett Favre (un)retirement rumors
• Articles prognosticating the end of email

And while tax codes are silly and Favre is fun, these articles are often downright ridiculous.

Sadly, many of the "email is dead" predictions hope to lure readers into the same false choice that is the hallmark of "provocative" journalism. Is email dead? Yes or no. Is America's economy in trouble? Circle Y or N. Is the world in trouble? If we keep our dialog at this level, it certainly will be.

Let me preface my response by saying that I am biased. I am self-aware and self-described email bigot. I like email and find it (like millions of others) to be very valuable. In fact, I like it so much that I banked my career on it.

But I find it frustrating how predictable these email eulogy articles (which seem to come out every year) have become. The typical one goes something like this:

• Don't you get too much email? [emotional blackmail appeal to reader]
• I get too much email too [I feel your pain and am very important so don't feel bad if you don't hear back from me]
• [x] study reveals people get too much email [like you need a study to prove this]
• The problem is that email is broken - here's why
• Email is full of spam and viruses
• Email is used for too many things for which it wasn't intended [cite trite example of editing documents through email]
• Email is overwhelming
• Email is irrelevant to teenagers
• Email is unproductive
• The solution is [insert technology of day - IM, blogs, wikis, twitter]
• And it's all Microsoft's fault

Let's tackle these issues point-by-point:

1. Email is full of spam and viruses.

No one can deny this. Spam creates a chain around our collective, virtual necks in terms of productivity. However, the naivete in this argument is that spam somehow will not follow us into whatever communication medium (e.g., facebook) we use heavily. The fact is that we have zero marginal cost of communicating to the sender (no postage stamp) and a high profit potential for Unwanted Commercial Email (the friendly name for spam). When there is money, our world finds a way. So spam, while an issue that needs to be prosecuted with viglience, is not an email issue - it's a communications issue.

2. Email is used for too many things for which it wasn't intended.

Like spam, this falls into the "victim of its own success" category. Email definitely wasn't designed for large file transfers, group document editing or huge broadcasts. But its universality and flexibility outweigh many of these limitations.

As Andrew Mcafee points out in his 9x email argument, new technologies that are "better" for certain use cases (like document collaboration) have a very high bar in that they have to be way better (9 times as much) to justify switching off of something that works so universally. Andrew rightly points out that these new tools aren't "direct substitutes for email; instead, they're intended to provide capabilities that email can't."

You know what other things are used for applications for which they weren't intended? Radio. Television. Phones. PCs. x86 chips. The Internet. In communications, general-purpose, universal and "good enough" media are often the most effective.

3. Email is overwhelming.

I empathize on this one, because email is hard to deal with. Once you get into the hundreds of messages per day, you are in a different ballgame in terms of time management. I've spent countless hours coaching my various teams on how to best manage and process email.

That being said, email is again being held up as a scapegoat for the larger fact that near-zero-marginal-cost, near-instant communications allow far more connections between people than ever before possible. This is great in many ways but we as a society are being forced to adjust to the consequences and are trying to find the balance.

The only reason email is the obvious poster child is because it is the medium of choice. As with spam, if facebook takes over, we'll start talking about needing therapy for handling our facebook wall messages. Authors, as in the ReadWriteWeb article mentioned above, sometimes try to point out that the email user interface itself is overwhelming:

"The Twitter experience is lighter because of the user interface. With Twitter, we're presented with a scrollable list of messages.

With email we need to select the message and drill into it. Traditionally email clients show only the subject line, so even if the message is short, the user needs to click. And all these clicks add up."

The fallacy in this logic is the fact that we are confusing the interface implementation (e.g., Microsoft Outlook email client) with the medium itself (email). As you probably know, anyone can build an email client and thousands exist today. Indeed, many clients (including Microsoft Outlook) include auto-preview functionality that shows the body of the message without a "click."

4. Email is irrelevant to teenagers.

I fully agree with this one, speaking from highly non-scientific, subjective data (nieces, nephews, etc.). As new children learn technology, they aren't bound by the principles and habits of the past, so they latch on to the latest and greatest (e.g., texting or social networks).

However, it will take generations for us email "luddites" to be worked through the system. So to declare defeat for email any time soon is premature.

Indeed, some of the analysis mistakenly attacks the popular implementation of an email client versus the medium itself. For example, this article on cnet talks about the fact that other media are much more available through mobile devices than email is. Any Blackberry user knows that email can be as mobile as anything else out there.

The main fact here is that the very same network effect that makes email so popular in the 30+ crowd (we use email because other people use email) is what limits it for the new generation (many teens don't use email, so therefore many teens don't use email).

However, us 30+ers plan to live for a few years to come.

5. Email is unproductive.

This point is the most relevant to business managers and the most troublesome in my opinion. The argument is that email interrupts your daily flow and makes you less efficient. For example, this study says that 28% of business time goes to "interruptions by things that aren't urgent or important, like unnecessary e-mail messages."

I 100% agree that interruptions (of any form) are killers of effectiveness. Like many, I try to turn off my email client whenever I want to get work done.

However, to say that the email "inbox" somehow is unique in its "interruptive"-ness is logically incorrect.

Our inbox simply represents our spot on the modern assembly line at which we look for new things to do. As anyone who flies a lot and has seen the Blackberries and iPhones pop up religiously as the wheels hit the ground, email is our habitual center and source of truth for what to do next.

If we have an issue with email being unproductive, we really have an issue with the amount of time we spend as workers "reacting" to others' priorities (the queue of email you have is set by others) versus creating based upon our own priorities.

And we also have to admit that the inbox is comforting. It tells you what to do. You can do it often and easily (reply-to-all with a "thanks" for example). And you often get near-instant validation (especially if the recipient is as addicted as you are).

Why do we check email when we wake up, when we go to bed and all throughout the day? Because we're addicted - not to email, but rather to the satisfaction and feedback loop that comes from a pre-defined queue of work.

Respond to others' priorities is easier.

This is definitely a problem, because left to its extreme, we won't create anything.

But eliminating email will simply shift our queue somewhere else (twitter, SMS, etc.)

Indeed, voicemail used to be the old "to do list" and has been written off by many including your's truly, because email is at least easier to manage.

Conclusions

• Clearly we have to learn to use email better.
• And the email clients need to continue to be more usable.
• Spam and viruses are simply the result of email's popularity and will follow to the next communication medium of choice.
• It's been hard to match the universality and flexibility of email - and the bar for new media is much higher.
• In many ways, new communication media are really additions rather than substitutes for email.
  
• We can switch off of email, but the queue will follow us somewhere...
• ...until we reconcile as businesses and a society how much reacting versus creating we actually want to be doing.
• Teenagers probably will not use email as heavily as we do, but they will still likely have some queue that guides their daily activities.
• So email is still alive and kicking.

Comments welcome. Or you can just email me.

The reports of Microsoft's death are greatly exaggerated

Here's a conversation that happened at least twenty times with my startup friends in Silicon Valley when I told them I was taking the CEO role at LiveOffice:

Friend: So what does LiveOffice do?

Nick: We provide email archiving and Microsoft Exchange through software-as-a-service.

Friend: Exchange? Do people still use that?

Nick: Yeah - there are like 150 MM+ seats of Exchange out there actually and it's growing 30-40% per year.

Friend: Really? I heard Microsoft is going out of business or something on techcrunch.

Nick: Umm...

Friend: And by the way... email is pretty much dead with facebook, twitter and all.

Nick: Thanks for the vote of confidence. I'll let you get back to "mashing" things up or whatever it is that you do.

You can definitely get stuck in your own little bubble if you don't watch out.

From my experience at Symantec leading the Enterprise Vault team and now at LiveOffice, I can say that the Microsoft ecosystem and customer base around email is still alive and kicking.

Obviously Google has created a compelling alternative with Google Apps. But I've found that many customers still love the tight integration of Microsoft Outlook, Office and Exchange as well as the huge network of technologies and technologists around it.  For the thousands of SMB clients we serve, we see that users are very comfortable with Microsoft Outlook as an interface and are loathe to switch. 

Personally, I still haven't found a Web-based email service that allows you to get through emails as quickly as you can with Outlook.  But I'm biased. :)

And sure - email will evolve over the long run and will at some point be end-of-lifed. But folks have been saying that for nearly a decade and my inbox volume hasn't missed a beat. As the famous economist John Maynard Keynes said, "In the long run, we're all dead." Between now and then, I'll keep checking my Blackberry, thank you very much.

This article about a Google employee going back to Microsoft (from where he originally came) made me think about how skewed the view is between Silicon Valley ("Microsoft is dead, Google has taken over and actually is in decline because Facebook is the new king") and the rest of the world. My favorite quote (probably apt to describe much of Web 2.0 in general sadly):

"This orientation towards cool, but not necessarilly useful or essential software really affects the way the software engineering is done. Everything is pretty much run by the engineering - PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. While they do exist in theory, there are too few of them to matter."

I also thought this was interesting:

"This is probably fine for free software, but I always laugh when people tell me that Google Docs is viable competition to Microsoft Office. If it is, that is only true for the occasional users who would not buy Office anyway. Google as an organization is not geared - culturally - to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications."

So in any case, we in the SaaS industry will watch with amusement as Google and Microsoft duke it out and the Bay Area writes off Redmond. Meanwhile, we'll eagerly service the "niche" 150 MM+ user Microsoft Exchange ecosystem.