August 26, 2005

Managing Email: A Hassle You Must Manage

The number one form of business communication is by far email. Of course in some industries fax is used quite a bit, but overall email reigns. This presents a challenge. How do you retain email and ensure that this retained (or archived) email can be retrieved later on?

As your business grows, keeping your email stored on local computers is not a good idea. If an employee is fired, do you want them deleting their email? What if there is a lawsuit that you must respond to. Having access to your email is going to be critical? Mobile devices and remote workers. How will you centrally manage their email.

I highly encourage you to read a News Factor article which reads E-mail contains valuable business information that is accessed daily by business users and must be preserved for legal and regulatory reasons just like paper records. The first business process that concerns e-mail is retention. The fact that e-mail is an electronic format makes it easy to transport and copy for retention purposes; but it also allows it to move easily throughout the organization into untraceable locations. When e-mail becomes spread across the organization on messaging servers, network shares and desktops, it cannot be managed effectively for retention.

A challenge for managing the retention process is to examine each possible storage location and decide on policies for its use. For example, Microsoft Latest News about Microsoft Personal Store (.PST) files are a popular local storage location for Microsoft Exchange e-mail data. PST's are useful for local e-mail storage but they create the opportunity for e-mail to be copied to network servers and home PC's using any available storage media. PST files are an example of an e-mail storage method that must be managed appropriately for retention. Read the full article here

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