Office Memo 14
Office Memo 14
8 October 2004


Beware holiday email cholesterol
How many times has this happened? As soon as you arrive back from your well-deserved break, you immediately think of the next day back at work. You get to tell your holiday tales of adventure and fun, perhaps even show off your tan.
All that fades away - including the tan - when you consider how many emails are waiting for you. The last time you came back from holiday, how many emails were there? 10, 150 or 1,000 messages? Whatever the number, it probably took too long to clear.
According to a recent study from the CBI, a quarter of executives take their laptops on holiday 'just in case'.
Others read the recent messages and skip the rest on the assumption that senders will re-send anything important. It is easy to wipe off the spam - just wipe without reading. While it seems the smart move, this knee-jerk response is risky and can have sudden and dire results.
A slow response to a complaint from your best customer might lose the relationship. With recent regulations, an internal email might end up as 'Exhibit A' in court in a libel case against your company. Your emails reach their limit and suddenly all emails are blocked, landing you and your organization in both legal and business hot water.
Email is getting out of control and our in-boxes are full of stuff that shouldn't be there. For the IT department, it is an avalanche that suddenly causes cardiac arrest. Between emails that copy you in to auto-reply emails saying you're unavailable, suddenly you are producing and storing more emails than when you are there. There is also the risk that you may have missed that warning email on viruses and inadvertently downloaded a potentially devastating payload.
While all this is symptomatic of poorly managed and protected email, the reality does not change for your IT infrastructure. The normal demands vanish under the sudden flash flood of emails that don't matter.
Organizations have finally sat up and are considering how to best manage this. IT managers have enough on their plate without suddenly having to drop everything and deliver emergency resuscitation to stop their servers from dying.
Doctors will tell you that prevention is better than cure. These are some preventive steps managers should adopt to reduce the email burden:
Limit file sizes - set and keep tough limits on email account sizes
Promote advanced user training. Few people move beyond the basics of using email. Help them to master archiving and the better management of emails
Move applications off the email system. Administrative tasks, such as time sheets or expenses, are better handled on corporate portals and intranets
When it comes to data management software, look for a tool that will manage mailbox quotas automatically. Ideally you should be able to set specific criteria. Examples might be age, size of attachment, and time since email was last looked at. The software should allow the user to still be able to see and access the mail should he or she decide to do so
Set up tight security policies. Reinforce them in the same way as storage, showing zero tolerance of non-work related emails with attachments. The recent spectre of 'socially engineered' viruses means that staff may be more likely to open emails without thinking, particularly after a long break
Establish policies and etiquette and ensure that staff adhere to them. If not, restrict their storage and security privileges.
The last is the most important. It is also the cheapest. Next time someone clutters a 100 in-boxes with something of interest to only 5 people, tell them that this is not acceptable. Set policies not only for handling offensive material but also for handling 'humorous' video clips, especially if you do not recognise their origin.
As in life, diet and discipline are vital to maintaining email health.

***
Alasdair Kilgour, UK managing director of CommVault contributed this article. Our thanks go to him.
CommVault is exhibiting at Storage Expo, which takes place at National Hall, Olympia, London from 13 - 14 October 2004. Now in its fourth year, the show features over 90 exhibitors and a comprehensive free education programme.

About Office Memos
An Office Memo is an extended comment on what is happening in the world of the electronic business and elsewhere. Some memos will have appeared in Office Jotter; others are simply referred to in it.
You are free to disagree with, amplify or even agree with anything that appears in Office Jotter or an Office Memo. Of course, the rest of us will never know this unless you write in with your views, so please comment*.
Content from Office Jotter or Office Memo may be circulated freely, so long as you remember to credit its source.
Thanks,
Roger Whitehead
Publisher and editor
%%

*No more than 1,000 words at a time, please. I edit material for publication but as lightly as possible.
Copyright Roger Whitehead, 2004. I hereby assert and give notice of my right under section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998 to be identified as the author of these publications.