We did a blog post last year around the must-have features for an email filing solution. In this blog article, we look at email management as a whole, and consider the criteria that should be used when evaluating an email management platform or when a purchasing decision is about to be made. There are clearly a few plugs for our own stuff – but hey what do you expect! It will be interesting to hear comments and open up debate.

Super Smart Email Filing

Email filing is a key part to a comprehensive email management solution. It allows end users file their email data, share it with their team, and share it with the organisation as whole. At the opposite end of the spectrum it also enable users to lock down their email data if it is personal to them.

Ultimately the email filing features need to be seamlessly baked into the core email applications. For most organisations this means super slick integration into Outlook (by far and away the most popular business email client). But also a comprehensive answer for access on the web (with feature rich internet applications) and the ability to file and retrieve on your chosen mobile device (windows mobile, blackberry and iphone being the key target devices).

Like I say we’ve touched on some of the key features for email filing before – but here’s a quick summary of the big ones:

• Filing dialog components that are consistent across apps and devices and intelligent i.e. favourite lists and dynamic recent lists.
• Once an email is filed all subsequent emails in the thread should automatically be filed – removing any burden from the end user.
• The filing mechanism should have in-built intelligence for suggesting where the email should be filed to (based on patterns and self-learning) even if a completely new email.
• The filing process or the underlying repository should de-duplicate emails so that there is a single source of truth and an uncluttered view of data for end users.
• The filing system must be performant – if the retrieval and collaboration process is slow then users will switch off. The filing mechanism must not lock-up the email tool when filing large volumes of data.
• The optional ability to force users to file every email

Integration With Core Business Systems

It’s absolutely key that your email management platform is integrated into your core business systems. This is particularly true for the email filing element of the system where email data typically needs to be organised into structures and workspaces that relate to your business e.g. projects, accounts, bills, opportunities, leads, sales orders etc… This enables your organisation to collaborate and navigate email content quickly and effectively and also enables you to orient your email management system to meet your compliance requirements. KnowledgeMill provides pre-built integration for Oracle Fusion Apps, SAP, NetSuite, SalesForce.com, MS Dynamics, and Thomson Reuters Elite to name but a few.

Mailbox Management

A key problem, particularly in larger organisations is that in terms of data sizes email messaging platforms just grow and grow and grow. Mailboxes become huge, inboxes and folders become unresponsive. This means poor performance, high cost, frustrations from end users, and ultimately inefficiency in the business. Many companies enforce a mailbox size limit, rely on PSTs, or implement a costly archiving system that adds little value to the business and annoys end users.

Once you’ve put an email management policy or system in place, what do you do with the structured and filed email data that’s sitting in your user’s mailboxes? The simple answer is that the email management solution must enable you remove the email data from the mailboxes based on business driven policy. This means centralised flexible control e.g. remove all personal email data after 3 months, remove all business related filed email after 6 months.

Users do like to keep their email data directly in their mailbox, as it’s the best place for current correspondence, conversations and to-do lists. However, with a slick email management solution in place, users begin to see their mailbox simply as a transient inbox – which is exactly what it should be.

Access Anywhere, Any Device

The mailbox management repository must not simply be a repository that’s stored and forgotten about. Users should use the repository on a daily basis (e.g. to see which email conversations have been taking place within the team or project). It should also be used to gain insight and intelligence. Therefore the data held within must be accessible 24 hours a day and from any device – directly in Outlook (hugely important), on the corporate intranet (web parts for Sharepoint are a must along with pre-built portlets), on the mobile, and on the web.

Consolidated Repository & Centralised Management

The mailbox management solution should help solve the problem keeping email data under control. Storing all your email data on general file shares would not be a good idea (your shifting the problem somewhere else).

Email should be de-duplicated and stored in a centralised repository so that the business has a “single source of truth” for a given email. It also helps from an end user perspective that views on the stored and filed email data is not cluttered with duplicate copies from different mailboxes. Holding the data centrally with “single source of truth” enables business driven and compliance driven lifecycle policies to be implemented. It also allows a single point of search for all email data which is critical for cost-effective eDiscovery (see relevant section).

A consolidated repository goes hand in hand with the ability to execute centralised management of the data. No longer are you having to “glue” together multiple systems. A central admin console should enable you to instantly change the management policies for an individual, a team, a department or a whole organisation at the click of a button. This includes managing how end user applications behave without the need for complicated desktop or mobile update rollouts.

Lifecycle Management & Legal Holds

By storing email data in the way in which your business works, you are no longer constrained by the lifecycle management policies of traditional content management of old. Policies like “delete all email data older than 5 years”, “delete all email data not accessed in the last 6 months” are no good to anyone in the real world. If really lucky the content management platform would allow lifecycles around storage tiers e.g. “move all data older than 1 year to tier 2, and after 2 years move to tier 3″. Not exactly intelligent stuff.

By putting your data into proper categorised business structures we can now apply “business driven policies”. For example “delete all data from the UK related to HR that is older than 1 year” or “move all personal email data older than 6 months into the cloud” or “delete all office gossip after 3 months”. You should be demanding these modern lifecycle management features in your email management platform. However, we don’t think many offer this baked into the product like KnowledgeMill do.

The other advantage of a neat lifecycle management feature is that you should be able to protect your data in a legal hold situation. For example “place a legal hold on all email data related to project alpha”.

Archiving & Complete Email Capture

The email management solution must come with a keep-all archiving feature. Many organisations have quite brutal compliance rules around keeping all email data. Just take a look at some of the finance houses and US institutions. Therefore a keep-all feature must be easy to configure and turn on. However, there might well be conflicting email compliance requirements from different compliance bodies – therefore the lifecycle management features must also be up to scratch (see previous section).

This leads nicely on what do you do with all the data once it’s been archived into your repository. First of all end users should be able to access all their archived email data as seamlessly as they access their filed data (but obviously locked down to the individual with appropriate security). This means Access Anywhere, Any Device (please see above).

From a compliance and risk officer perspective the user must be able to powerful searches and exports across the whole dataset, which leads us nicely on to…

eDiscovery

eDiscovery is big business, and big business normally means big cost. Large organisations spend billions of pounds, dollars, and euros on litigation and eDiscovery exercises. Typically these incidents are managed by large numbers of consultants with expensive software (often rented because there’s so many zeroes). Big bucks. By putting your email data into a centralised repository with an auditable single source of truth against the emails – you suddenly have the opportunity to search just one repository instead. This saves the time and money of gluing together multiple emails servers, restoring old backups and looking across PST files on desktops. KnowledgeMill offer this architecture, but also provide the tools to search the repository through our eDiscovery app – a powerful multi-dimensional search tool for searching, narrowing, and filtering to the desired email data set. Then easily exporting in the format of your choice for subsequent delivery in-house, to the court, or to an external compliance body.

Knowledge Management & Business Development

If you look at typical professional services organisation around 85% of their overall data volumes are taken up by email data. In today’s world, rightly or wrongly, email has become the tool of choice for business communications. Looking at current growth charts the use of email looks set to double year on year – even with the advent of instant messaging. What happens to all this data? More often than not, it’s stuck in user’s mailboxes, or in some archive that’s too clunky to use that no-one looks at it. This is bonkers.

Think of all the knowledge that’s in those emails and document attachments. Details of how a deal was landed, how a problem was solved, how a bid was realised, how an introduction was made, how relationships evolved, or how an account was strengthened. Basically stacks of good stuff. From a business perspective, it is absolutely key that this knowledge and data is re-used again and again to learn and benefit from.

An email management repository if delivered in the right way becomes the ultimate knowledge repository – this is gold dust to a business and provides competitive edge – it avoids knowledge sitting with individuals and draining away from the collective. KnowledgeMill is big on baking in intelligence into the application. Find out who has expertise within the organisation, mark an email item as a key piece of knowledge for others to share, find out who has influence inside the organisation and with key customers outside the organisation. Would you have to build this functionality yourself or integrate with your business intelligence / reporting platform. Should you really have to do this? Your better off with a solution that ships with built in analytics and business intelligence.

When considering your email management platform, ask if it helps with business development. Would it help me decide who to bring to pitch or who could solve a technical problem? If the answer is no, consider if it is really adding value to the business and therefore it is worth the money?

Enrich Your CRM

Email, email, email. We love it. We hate it. Everyone uses it. Even my Mum loves to have a good natter with her friends on gmail even though they live next door! From a business perspective, many customer interactions now take place over email. Therefore it’s very important to take advantage of this and use it as a powerful tool to help improve your customer relationship management. Even in a small company, the ability to pull back all conversations related to a particular customer, prospect, lead, or sales engagement is very very important. Many of the email integration points for the CRM systems suck. When looking at value add, does the email management platform integrate with my CRM system. If not, how hard would it be to integrate. We’ve got simple integration points, but we also offer out of the box integration with some major ones like Salesforce.com and MS Dynamics. Consider this carefully.

Risk & Compliance

Does you email management platform enable you to meet your risk and compliance needs? Not only for making sure that you retain your email data but also so you make sure that when it’s meant to be deleted it really is deleted. Even though smaller organisations aren’t necessarily governed by compliance law, they certainly have common rules that they must conform to around their data. Meeting your own risk and compliance rules is often specific to the company, but you need the right tools in the bag – email filing (and the key ability to force users to file their email), lifecycle management, eDiscovery, and quite often complete email capture.

Does the solution deal with all your email data? What about those pesky PSTs sitting on users desktops, pen drives, and laptops. Can you cope with this headache?

Extensibility & Open Standards

Imagine when your email management platform is happily humming away ingesting emails and managing your data just the way you want it to? What now you say? Well you’re more than likely going to want to do things with it in the future – perhaps expose information into other end-user applications, integrate information into upstream and downstream systems (well OK only if you’re a big company).

In order to do this you need an easy integration point and a comprehensive API. KnowledgeMill’s OnePlace ships with a single comprehensive web services API (a set of REST services) and all of our applications are built on top of it (we eat our own dog food). All modern systems and programming languages can talk to web services so building your own apps and integration points is a doddle for a competent developer.

Even if you’re a small company you will want to know that you have a programmatic way of getting your data out of the system – because like all software choices you want to avoid a lock-in and have the ability to migrate. A published, well documented API is critical. Many don’t.

How is the data stored? does it allow future proofing and the ability to open the email in years to come? We offer flexibility for the how the email data is stored. This can be an open-standard RFC822 MIME based format or a proprietary format from the target email system (e.g. MSG/TNEF for MS Exchange). The important thing is choice – and the customer should be allowed to make the decision.

Cloud Readiness

Are you planning on moving key IT services into the cloud? Or perhaps many of your services are already there? In either case, you need to consider the following:

• Firstly is the email management solution available as both an on-site solution and as a cloud based service?
• If my email is on-site, can I still have my email management service as cloud service (this can be a great cloud-enabler and clever first step)?
• If my email is already in the cloud or a hosted service, will the email management solution still work?
• The answer should be yes to all these things.

Summing Up

Anyway, hopefully you’ve found some merit in this fairly long brain dump and managed to stay with it long enough to reach this paragraph. I’m sure we’ll add to this blog entry as time goes by – but would be great to get some comments and feedback.