Managing e-mail as a business process
Author: Computer Technology Review

Recent surveys reveal what we all know by direct experience to be true--e-mail is the number one form of business communication. When compared with traditional telephone, voice mail and fax communication, e-mail is consistently rated as the business communication tool that users rely on the most. All this hype around e-mail has made the messaging server the most critical application in the data center and has also made it a popular topic in board room discussions with regards to managing corporate risk for compliance and litigation.

Due in part to this demand for improved e-mail management and the need to protect the valuable business information that e-mail contains, e-mail must be managed as an important business process. This article will review three major processes that impact e-mail management--retention, disposition and accessibility and it will discuss, through a specific example of a unique solution, how third party applications for e-mail archive are designed to manage all three processes more efficiently than native messaging applications.

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.