Enabling Email Search for Innovation and Productivity

Think of any high-profile project in your organization. Now, think of any files (document, presentation, project plan, budget) linked to that project. Where would you look for the most recent version of these files? On a departmental file server? On the corporate SAN? Stored in your document management system? Or maybe on someone’s laptop?

I can tell you with a very high degree of certainty where you’ll find the files — in your Enterprise Messaging System. It is pretty clear that if a document, spreadsheet, or presentation has any value whatsoever to your organization, it's being circulated among team members, partners, suppliers or customers, and at least 95 percent of the time as an attachment to an email message.

This isn't necessarily the way you want things to be done, especially if your organization has spent tons of money on a content or document management system, but it's simply the reality of how email gets used across most organizations today. As a result, we all know that email messages have come to be regarded as vital business documents, meaning they need to be stored and searchable.

However, what's driving the need for reliable, fast email search is mostly compliance and control — legislated eDiscovery, internal audits or mailtaps, and workplace litigation. It's all about finding the smoking gun. As a result most of the solutions have a narrow, negatively tinged focus. I’ve found that the decision to purchase and implement our solutions is rarely about improving knowledge sharing and enhancing productivity or competitiveness.

Time for an attitude shift! Once you approach email archiving from a new point of view and recognize it as one of the richest collaboration engines in your organization, a whole new perspective takes shape. You can start to effortlessly capture these rich conversations and content, index them, and make them available across your entire organization in new and positive ways.

Why not start to use stored email as a competitive advantage? For example, say I'm the new sales guy in an organization. The ability to search email lets me dive into the threads between customers and my company's most experienced salespeople. I can see how they walked through an opportunity with a customer. It's all right there in a threaded view: the customer's question, the account executive's reply, the attachments he included, the business case, the worksheet, the ROI information.

What a treasure trove of information. And, the organization didn't have to do anything special to compile it. Because it's email, it's organic. These conversations are taking place every day; why not leverage them for more than just that one moment of communication?

I hope I’ve got you excited about this new, more positive and broader perspective on why you should consider the deployment of an Email Archiving solution as one of your most strategic projects — instead of just a way to avoid restoring messages from backup tapes in the event of a nasty lawsuit.

– Pierre Chamberland
Pierre Chamberland is the Chief Energizing Officer at Messaging Architects.