A few days old, but noteworthy: In an interesting twist, IBM announced the availability of the latest version of Notes/Domino at Macworld, only two weeks ahead of Lotusphere – IBM’s own product showcase held annually in Orlando.

I think, this signals two things:

1. IBM acknowledges the growing popularity of the Mac, and its increasing usage worldwide. Macworld in particular is a great venue to connect with real end-users, many of which may not even know that Notes still exists. The success of MS-Exchange has been largely driven by the ubiquitous nature of Outlook, and IBM must rebuild end-user awareness and street-cred to regain market share.
2. Lotus is hoping to leverage years of heavy investment in Eclipse, which gives Notes instant cross-platform capabilities and feature parity on non-Wintel systems, including the Mac and of course Linux.

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Many people dread the idea of disconnecting from email while taking time off, for fear of missing critical information or emergencies that need their attention back at the office.

I met Jared Goralnick, an efficiency and productivity consultant, at the inaugural IORG conference last summer in NY, and he told me about a solution he had been working on, called AwayFind.

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Email is undoubtedly the most heavily used electronic communication medium today. We use email to communicate in business, to stay in touch with friends and family, get shipment notifications, bill reminders, statements from the utility or cable company and on and on…

This convenience comes at a price.  Not only do our our inboxes become increasingly cluttered, but the more often we share our primary address on the Internet the greater the chance of getting onto spammers distribution lists as well.

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Michael Osterman of Osterman Research published this great article on NetworkWorld yesterday.

“E-mail is an extraordinarily useful tool, as virtually all of us recognize. However, it can create enormous liabilities for an organization and it can cost an organization more than it should.”

In the article, Osterman lists examples of corporate liability and unnecessary cost caused by un-managed corporate email. He suggests four steps to address the problem:

1. Establish detailed corporate use policies.
2. Deploy monitoring and reporting solutions to gain insight and assure compliance.
3. Implement real-time policy enforcement that automatically handles suspect messages.
4. Think beyond email. IM and collaborative applications are exposing the company to similar problems just like email.

Permessa is listed as one of the vendors that provides extensive solutions in this space. As an additional reference on this topic, check out our latest whitepaper titled: “6 Best Practices That Reduce Email Overload and Costs“.

Technorati Tags: Osterman, email policy, email policy management

Everybody has heard of the 80/20 rule, also called the Pareto principle, which states that in many cases, business and otherwise, 80% of the effects come only from 20% of causes. Email is no exception – however, the ratio is far more extreme.

Our analysis of large messaging environments over many years has revealed that in most companies 80% of the corporate messaging resources are being consumed by only about 1% of all employees.

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Another chapter in the saga surrounding millions of missing White House emails was written this week, when judge John Facciola ordered the Bush administration to collect and preserve all emails stored in .pst files including data copied onto portable media such as flash drives.

While there are many theories about the missing emails, reaching from government conspiracy to sheer incompetence, I would side with the latter.

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