Time For A New Look At Email Management.

This article is the first in a two-part series. The second part will appear in the July issue of CTR.

Records management has historically provided an intelligent means for the storage and management of the official records created by businesses. But today's MIS and records management professionals are facing a new challenge: electronic communications, specifically email systems, now account for the majority of the business-critical records being created, captured, and stored in the corporate environment. Email systems were never intended to support the discipline of records management. Email systems presently do not offer the functional tools capable of providing any intelligence on email content, because they are not "content-aware." In other words, email systems do not have the intelligent wherewithal to understand the relevance of the data stored within them. Moreover, email systems are not optimized to quickly retrieve specific information from the large volume of unstructured data they hold.

The explosive use of email as a primary communications medium, the demand for effective storage management spurred by new technologies, and the growing acceptance of electronic commerce have created a huge market for new, truly "intelligent" information archiving and access tools. Many email archiving methods on the market today can store and retrieve email messages; however, they lack the capability to review messages and attachments as they are received and to safely keep only what an organization requires. This lack of an "auto-categorization capability" leaves organizations vulnerable to spending large amounts of money to store and manage large, unnecessary volumes of redundant or worth-less email data that can't be easily retrieved or authenticated. As this volume continues to escalate, the business-critical intelligence embodied in these electronic communications can become totally obscured. Consider these statistics:

* Email use in the U.S. will grow from the current 3.2 billion email messages daily to over 9 billion by 2003.

* Critical Networks reports that 60% of business critical information is stored within messaging systems.

* With the average size of an email message at 18,500 bytes and growing, according to Business Week, the amount of information flow becomes gigantic--somewhere between 11,285 and 20,350 terabytes.

* According to a University of California at Berkeley study, the world's total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage--equivalent to 250 megabytes per person for each man, woman, and child on earth.

* IDC projects that the worldwide data warehouse tool market will grow from $5 billion in 1997 to $17 billion in 2004, citing the gradual market shift from capturing and storing data to delivery of information to a wide range of users.

As organizations ramp-up IT departments and institute email policies to handle the increasing volumes of email data, many overlook the potential risks, along with storage and productivity costs associated with email archiving. This leads to archiving without knowing whether relevant emails containing important corporate knowledge are being captured, and whether redundant, detrimental, or outdated information is automatically removed.

Seventy Percent Of Email Not Neccessary

Many organizations estimate that up to 70% of the email data they currently receive is not necessary and could be eliminated prior to archiving. These emails contain redundant or worthless data that no longer represents any value to the organization. Some email data could also present a high security and litigation risk to companies, which means that appropriate procedures must be instituted to safeguard or remove this data. The remaining 30% of the email data within an organization's archive repository contains critical business information that is difficult to search, retrieve, and leverage for competitive advantage or litigation protection.

Email Was Never Designed To Do This...

In the highly competitive business environment, profitable connections and business interactions depend on the availability of timely, relevant, and applicable information. A successful enterprise is one that can quickly access its vital, business-critical information, and extend the availability of that information within the enterprise and beyond to customer suppliers and partners. Email has become the fastest growing technology of the decade, with over 50 million email users in the world. Email has become so prevalent in today's corporate environment that it is now used as the de facto tool for enterprise-wide communication and collaboration.

However, email systems were never intended to support the need to manage and archive an organization's huge volume of business data as "long-term" corporate assets. Email users are typically left to manage corporate email on their own with few controls in place. Email policies often are too little too late, are hard to enforce, and have proven to be a constant burden to both end users and IT staff. Most of the software solutions currently available to address these email shortcomings place additional burdens on end users and IT staff, and these solutions do not effectively solve the problem. What is needed is a solution that not only cost-effectively addresses the problem, but also accomplishes this without placing any additional burdens on the end user or IT staff while still supporting the corporate policies and compliance requirements that are now needed for email archiving.

For example, one solution is based on ArcIQ technology, which provides organizations with intelligent email management tools to properly administer and archive the discrete business information residing in their email systems. ArcIQ is capable of understanding the content and context of the data residing in email systems.

Today's Most Pressing Business Problem

According to IDC, the number of email messages sent worldwide in 1995 numbered 101 billion, in 2000 this number was 2.6 trillion messages, and in 2005 it is predicted to exceed 9.2 trillion email messages. In addition, the average number of email messages sent per day continues to grow exponentially Email today is more than just a communications medium. Corporate email systems such as Microsoft Exchange have become long-term stores of critical business information. According to one market study, one third of the information used by employees of large companies resides within the corporate email systems.

Nevertheless, the Microsoft Exchange email systems were never meant to be used as a permanent repository. It is a single database file on the Exchange Server, effectively limited in size by system performance and nightly backup times to a file size of approximately 20GB to 30GB. The finite size of the message store translates into limits on the size of each user mailbox. A user's typical 45MB allocation makes the mail folder at best a temporary repository--25-30 days' worth at the average rate of 1.7MB per user per day. To free up space, users either have to delete some messages or move them somewhere else--most often to a personal message storage folder on the desktop computer, or to a network file server. While the Microsoft Outlook client supports auto archiving old messages to personal message folders, every folder and subfolder must be set up individually, and unlike the corporate Microsoft Exchange message store, these messages are not usually backed up.

Tim Shinkle is CTO at TrueArc (Arlington, VA).