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The rapid expansion of email usage over the last fifty years can be seen as one of the major technical, scientific and sociological evolutions of recent times. Pre-dating the Internet and contributing significantly to its development, email is widely considered to be one of, if not the, most important business communications tools ever invented. This ebook will explore some of the challenges email faces in the near future. 2
Radicati - the technology research firm that has been publishing definitive email statistics since 1993 - reports that email usage continues to grow and will increase its dominance in the coming years. Their 2015 Email Statistics Report revealed that there are currently 2.6 billion worldwide email users and this will increase to over 2.9 billion by 2019. Radicati also reports that the average business user typically receives 88 emails per day, and this is likely to increase to 96 by 2019. Despite its global dominance, email faces challenges around information overload and the way messages are currently stored and managed. These limits have less to do with fundamental problems of email technology and more to do with the way most organizations and service providers currently use email to communicate. 3
What s wrong with business email today? In the vast majority of organizations, email remains the primary method of exchanging unstructured information with colleagues, partners and customers. It is widely used for: Exchanging messages Professional correspondence Delegating and managing tasks Sharing documents Requesting and managing work orders Over the last thirty years, most companies have replaced paper archives with electronic document management systems such as SharePoint, which is used in 80% of F500 companies. In the electronic world, official documents such as proposals, contracts, and product specifications are stored in these systems. However, largely for technological reasons, email is stored separately in email systems, such as Microsoft Exchange or Google s Gmail. This dichotomy has led to a breakdown in information management; creating confusion and incoherence, while placing an enormous burden on the company to find relevant information quickly for audits, discovery, and compliance needs. 4
Why do we separate email from other documents? The world s most popular office productivity and collaboration providers such as Microsoft, Google, and IBM separate email from other kinds of documents. An enormous range of file types word processing documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, images and more are managed efficiently within document management systems, such as SharePoint. In these systems, documents are tagged with increasingly sophisticated metadata to help users find them. Email preceded other modern electronic documents. As a result it is perceived as a different type of artifact and is therefore handled as a separate IT silo. Emails have different identifying properties than other documents. Email was historically seen as less official than letters or signed documents. Email messages, by contrast, are stored haphazardly within user email inboxes. Hard to find, with no associated metadata and at risk of permanent deletion for a variety of reasons (an employee leaves the organization, email Inboxes overflow, inadvertent archiving mistakes, etc.), emails receive almost no consistent attention even though they often contain incredibly important information. 5
When Email is Handled Separately The separation of email from other documents has clear historical roots. However, there is no fundamental reason emails should be stored and managed separately. Furthermore, this insistence on treating emails differently to other documents is in fact counterproductive to the business: It becomes hard to find emails, even if they contain crucial information. If the only proof of a transaction or agreement is held in an email, retrieving it for compliance or regulatory purposes can become time consuming, especially if the message has been archived. If a team is working on a project but needs to check one piece of correspondence held in an absent member s inbox, they cannot do their work. Even the best company search engines cannot draw in results from inboxes and document repositories without extensive and complicated customization. This makes finding required information unnecessarily time consuming. 6
Employees use email like any other document For too long, document management environments from the humble C: drive to the most advanced cloud based platforms - have forced users to keep their emails and other documents apart. However, in their daily working patterns employees use email just like any other document as illustrated in the following examples. The project manager Throughout any project, product managers depend on a variety of tools to complete their tasks. Proposals may be written in Microsoft Word, Excel Spreadsheets are used to plan project stages, and email is used to manage tasks and delegate responsibilities. While documents are stored in a common folder that all project members can see, emails are stored apart, only accessible to the individuals who sent or received them. This situation presents obstacles to smooth collaboration. For example, it is possible for a team member to view project progress on the spreadsheet because it is stored in a shared folder. Or it is possible to find specific files by searching for specific metadata attached to the documents. These methods, however, do not commonly apply to email. 7
The compliance manager Organizations are more aware than ever of the need to responsibly store certain types of information in a structured and secure manner. Whether the information regards customer details, legal documentation or financial information, efficient information management is essential for compliance and regulation. Public sector organizations are obliged to hold certain types of data regarding their activities and the citizens with whom they come into contact. Regulations such as the US Freedom of Information Act, the FOI Act in the UK or Regulation no. 1049/2001 of the European Commission are important here. In the Private sector, similar legislation applies in different industries, from the Data Protection Act to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (USA 2002), from the Financial Services and Markets Act (UK, 2000) to professional requirements such as Technical Actuarial Standards, APS X2 Review and in-house controls. Legislation does not distinguish between emails and other types of documents and still, emails are most commonly stored separately and far less efficiently than other kinds of documents. 8
Work orders when email is the document Businesses regularly send actual invoices, proposals, contracts and more, as the body of email messages especially once a close working relationship has developed. Smaller companies in particular do away with official work orders altogether. Once a business feels it can trust a supplier, why go through the extra hassle of filling in work orders and contracts at each stage? Email is so much easier. However, when a business needs to submit its accounts and payment records they will be stung by the fact that their emails are always kept separate from other documents. 9
A new approach to email and document management is required The traditional approach of separating email and other documents is now counterproductive and counterintuitive. Whether it is for collaboration, knowledge retention, compliance, records management, audit or discovery, organizations need to manage emails the same way they manage other documents. Specifically, emails go through drafts and versions, so they should have assigned metadata and be versioned just like any other document, and they should be stored and classified in the same repository so they can be found later on. 10
Organizations struggling with the separation of email and documents have developed various strategies for dealing with this omission: Implement email and document retention policies and encourage employees to follow them. Train employees to understand how to manage different document types, regularly reminding them to save important emails to the company s Document Management System. Encourage employees to download important emails, convert them to documents and manually move them to the appropriate document repositories. Perform monthly inbox clean ups where unimportant emails are permanently deleted and staff transfer essential emails to permanent archives. While the above methods do encourage better management of email and documents, they are nonetheless limited. All these options are time consuming; employees find them inconvenient and are likely to avoid managing data correctly unless absolutely compelled to do so. They are also manual and ad hoc so important emails may be missed. 11
A better, alternative solution enables users to drag and drop emails to the company's Document Management System, while automatically assigning metadata to email messages. In this case, emails stored in the Document Management System should be accessible on mobile devices as well. harmon.ie helps companies address this email management challenge without having to change the systems they already use. Our productivity tools enable you to manage documents from SharePoint or OneDrive and email services from Exchange in a unified manner. Today s information management challenges call for a unified email and document management approach harmon.ie delivers. Dragging an email to SharePoint via LEARN MORE 12