Digital Landfill

E-mail management will be a major focus of the upcoming ECM West event, November 7-9 in San Jose.  Sessions will address such topics as a case study of e-mail management within Microsoft, the legalities of e-mail management, content protection in e-mail systems, and how to evaluate an e-mail archive system.  Registration information.

Most organizations still have not differentiated between e-mail back-up and e-mail archiving strategies.  In addition, for most organizations, e-mail retention is still a one size fits all approach, not a real strategy.

According to an upcoming survey by AIIM, most organizations still have not differentiated between e-mail back-up and e-mail archiving strategies.  The finding reinforces another from the survey--most organizations are still in the early stages of developing an e-mail management strategy, exposing a significant compliance problem.

Fewer than 1 in 5 end users truly have an approach to e-mail archiving that could be described as a real strategy (either using an e-mail archiving tool or as part of an RM process).  For the rest of end users, what passes for e-mail archiving is usually a reliance on .PST files, a reasonable back-up approach for individual mailboxes, but hardly a true e-mail archive (consider how challenging it would be to find something from thousands of .PST files in the event of a discovery requirement).

This finding is consistent with past AIIM surveys, and brings to mind a comment on one of the past surveys..."What passes for e-mail archiving in my organizations is the creation of massive honking .PST files that no one knows what to do with."

According to an upcoming AIIM survey, over 60% of organizations leave e-mail retention up to individual users.  29% arbitrarily save e-mail for a pre-determined time; better than nothing, but falling far short of a true retention strategy based on the content of the e-mail.

For most end users, good intentions are about as far as it goes when it comes to serious e-mail management.

According to a new survey by AIIM, Microsoft Exhange is the predominant e-mail platform for 70% of corporate and government organizations, followed Lotus Notes with 14%.  E-mail has shifted over the last decade from being a conversational medium to one of the primary media used for documenting business decisions.  Half the respondents in the survey spend between 25 and 50% of their day on e-mail related activities.

The findings are part of a comprehensive survey that will be released by AIIM. 

According to a new survey by AIIM of 1000+ end users scheduled to be released October 4, organizations face an uphill fight in gaining control of their e-mail systems.  Fewer than 1 in 7 end users report that they "Have completed implementation of an overall e-mail management strategy across the entire organization," indicating a significant compliance exposure.  When added to the challenges facing organizations from unmanaged IM systems, the results point to the need for end user organizations to make e-mail management a top priority.

According to an upcoming survey to be released by AIIM on Wed Oct 4 (contact to make sure you are on the distribution list), over 50% of end user organizations have some sort of instant messaging within their organization.  In most cases, these deployments have been unmanaged, with little thought given to the compliance implications created by these message flows.

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We're still gathering data for our new email survey (click here to participate and get a free copy of the results) but the preliminary results point to the critical importance of e-mail in day to day business and organizational processes.  In response to the question, "On average, the percentage of time I spend on e-mail related activity..." half the respondents report that they spend between a quarter and half their time on email-related activities.

All this points to some of the data in the rest of survey that highlights the woeful state of most e-mail management systems within organizations.  One would be hard pressed to find an area within most organizations that is simulataneously so important AND managed so hapazardly.