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Email Archiving, can it be more than just Archiving?

The Power of Email Gary White – Waterford Technologies Email is the most important Business Intelligence resource of any organisation worldwide. It

The Power of Email

Gary White – Waterford Technologies

Email is the most important Business Intelligence resource of any organisation worldwide. It is the main connection point between clients, partners, prospects, employees and vendors. That alone makes it the most critical element of your business. A point that is often ignored or forgotten in today’s business environment of chasing the next new technology in the marketplace which promises insight into your targets, sales pipeline, contacts in markets, information on KPI’s, how to increase productivity, where and when to target sales opportunities, security of your IP etc. etc.

It’s all at your fingertips and not only will you not need a huge financial outlay and multiple different systems and platforms to track all of these individually. Your organisation needs one simple solution that will actually SAVE you TIME & MONEY. Email Archiving!!!

Now like everything in this world there are email archiving solutions and there are email archiving solutions. I’m talking about a solution that doesn’t just tackle storage, I’m talking about a solution that will pro-actively manage your storage, give detailed analysis and reports, keyword searches, contacts, compliance and eDiscovery as just some of its key features.

So where does an organisation start, start by identifying the needs of not just your IT department but also your HR, Finance, Marketing and Sales teams. Use this information to build a shopping list or check list for your email archiving solution.

Added benefits of an email archiving solution

  • Lower Storage Costs

If your Exchange data storage costs are increasing, you need more investment in hardware, storage and management. You need an email archiving solution that can reduce your storage by 85%. Which in turn reduces your TCO and your back-up times by 90%?

  • Remove PST’s

Personal archive files are dangerous to use and are difficult to manage. As corporate business records, they may not be on the corporate file server, on network drives and possibly not on company premises at all. Also, personal archives can easily get corrupted and become unusable. Users may delete them by accident or take them when they leave the company, taking important business records with them.

Once a personal archive file is created and the original email is deleted from the company’s server, it is impossible to access these email assets for legal cases, record retention, compliance audits, HR investigations or any business reason that may require the email content (contracts, approvals, decision trails, time-stamp/proof of email being sent).

Get an archiving solution that eliminates the need for user quotas and the need to create and manage PST/NSF files. The net effect of archiving email is that end users will have virtually unlimited space to store their email and attachments.

  • Increase Productivity

With an increase in more and more employees working remotely, they need quicker and better access to their data. Ensure an email archiving solution that employees can easily access without the need of the IT helpdesk or by spending hours searching themselves.

  • Retention Management

A flexible and powerful solution to manage your email records. A solution that can set retention policies or litigation hold based on group categorization of messages. This assures that messages are deleted or protected to meet your compliance and legal needs.

  • Reporting and Analysis

Detailed and powerful drill-down reporting that provides advanced intelligence about email activity, usage patterns and trends. Understand where email poses a risk, and how to avoid liabilities. Perfect for pro-actively managing compliance, enforcing policies and monitoring employee non-business email.

  • eDiscovery

An investigative interface made for legal professionals and staff that need to perform frequent in-depth searching and analysis on past email activity, email messages and attachments. Make sure the solution also offers group searching, tagging, and export capabilities.

  • Easy Implementation

Make sure the solution is an easy to install product ideally with client-less installation, simple roll out, easy to interface and most importantly straight forward management (this is often the biggest financial cost of any system).

  • Flexibility

Choose a solution that not only meets your deployment requirements now but also for the future. Ensure the solution you choose can be with On-Premise, Cloud or Hybrid based.

Another important factor is Flexibility in costs, try ensure that you can make commercial decisions based upon your capabilities whether its CAPEX, OPEX or SaaS.

  •  Support

The old adage no one gets fired for buying the big name brand still rings true today, the problem is the day to day management and support and whether that big name understands or cares about your organisation. Make sure the company you choose works with and for you and to how they want. Talk to existing customers, ask for references or think about the sales process, how quick were the responses, how flexible were they, did they go the extra mile?

The above might not solve all your problems or make the process an easier, but it will help you and your organisation get a better understanding of your needs and requirements whilst including more departments which should in turn help make the overall process and buy-in easier and quicker for all.

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