Permessa Control! v6 is the Most Comprehensive Monitoring, Reporting and Compliance Solution for IBM Lotus Domino and Lotus Sametime available today.

LOTUSPHERE, ORLANDO, FL. (PR WEB) January 18, 2010 – New versions of the award-winning Permessa Control! products were announced today by Permessa Corporation at Lotusphere in Orlando, Florida. These products enable enterprises to both lower costs and improve compliance with their mission-critical messaging systems. Permessa Email Control! won the 2009 Lotus Award for Best Tool or Utility and was a finalist for the prestigious 2009 IBM Beacon Award. Permessa IM Control! was a finalist for the 2009 Lotus Award for Best Collaboration product.

See the full announcement here.

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“New York attorneys ordered Hirsch to provide records of the content of the messages exchanged on TXTmob during the convention, as well as the identification of people who sent and received messages, the time the messages were sent for the duration of the event, and a list of people who used the service during the event.”

Hirsch is fighting to protect the privacy of the users of his service, but it is becoming clear that under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, text-messages and for that matter all other electronic communications are admissible in court.

This raises some serious privacy concerns and makes you want to think twice of twittering about your life’s every moment.

The even bigger question is how companies must and can comply with discovery requests that are as broadly defined as seen in this case. The archiving of email messages is already adding a huge expense to corporate IT budgets. In case of litigation, the cost of retrieval and e-discovery of this archived content is often even bigger.

Companies should certainly consider these issues when leveraging new collaborative technologies.

Technorati Tags: txtmob, twitter, text-messaging, tad hirsch

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Most organizations that maintain their own internal messaging infrastructure have already invested in a number of different backup and fail-over systems that reduce the risk of prolonged outages. These systems typically consist of clustered mail servers and mass-storage devices, backup power and redundant network connectivity.

But what about external dependencies?

Contingency planning is becoming increasingly complex, as more and more businesses rely on external solution providers for their electronic messaging infrastructure. These services are provided in form of complete outsourcing of enterprise email and IM, hosted security & anti-spam gateway filtering solutions, and mobile messaging networks, to name just a few. Of course, the Internet itself is the most critical backbone of it all.
In recent weeks we have witnessed a number of incidents that made me wonder how many companies are actually prepared for infrastructure disruptions that are outside of their direct control.

What do you do when your company’s Internet connectivity is disrupted for days?

How does your field work force cope when mobile messaging goes down?

It is well worthwhile to include these and similar scenarios in a corporate contingency plan.

…or you can have a different outlook altogether, compliments of The Onion

Technorati Tags: internet outage, email disruption, RIM outage

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An interesting post on Adam Gartenberg’s blog is suggesting that Instant Messaging and in this case Sametime specifically, is starting to grow into the same rank of becoming a highly pervasive, mission-critical enterprise application that people cannot live without. In his post, Adam talks about a large Sametime customer that is scheduling a software upgrade on a Saturday at midnight.

“In their words, they started five years ago with a perception in the company that “IM is a toy,” and now have to schedule upgrades not only for the weekend, but at midnight on the weekend, in order to minimize disruption to their business.”

Multiple comments on the post suggest that this is not an exception either.

“We also struggle to find a decent upgrade window. Our other infrastructure teams find Sametime invaluable to communicate during the weekend/nightime when they are carrying out their own upgrades and maintenance. With many working remotely from home it would be difficult for them to operate effectively without it. We utilise an IP sprayer so that we can ‘remove’ a server from the virtual IP at a time to minimise downtime.”

“I’ve had a couple of customers say that they can handle e-mail being down for a few hours, but Sametime…? No way.”

“I rarely hear people call real-time collaboration ‘a toy’ any more. I believe most people are realising the benefits.”

The following comment makes the case for my second test, by using Sametime beyond its originally intended purpose.

“I deployed Sametime for a Bank (not in the US) a few years ago, and they love it so much that sometimes when the branch offices can’t connect to the main iSeries (for Banking transactions) they almost make transactions using Sametime.”

Just as email has become a reliable (and costly) tool of convenience for file sharing, Sametime due to its real-time nature is starting to be used for other unintended and perhaps even unsanctioned transactions.

This puts pressure on corporate IT to manage IM just like any other mission-critical application in the enterprise, which includes H&A monitoring, usage reporting and policy enforcement. Is your company ready for this?

See also: Enterprise IM is growing up, Enterprise IM is growing up, cont.

Technorati Tags: Sametime, IM mission-critical, enterprise IM

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McKinley is not the first nor will he be the last to hail the end of email, but I think he is missing the point.

Roger sums it up rather well:

“I agree that email will change over time. There will be more efficient content monitoring and prioritization. Maybe the spam problem will be licked. It will also learn from the items John mentioned for new features.

But, email was evolutionary and based on a proven model — namely the post office. It traces its history back to 1516, when Henry VIII established a “Master of the Posts”. The Royal Mail service was first made available to the public by Charles I on July 31, 1635. (Wikipedia)

So, new technology will incorporate new features. But, email is here to stay.”

The problems associated with email today are largely a side effect of its pervasiveness and robustness, resulting in overuse and targeted abuse. New communication tools will offload some of that burden, but will equally have to solve their own problems of misuse as we can already observe with the occurrence of SMS & IM spam or the defacement of wiki entries and Facebook walls.

Unified communication in the form of email integrated with IM chat, presence and VOIP in conjunction with social platforms will complete email not displace it.

Technorati Tags: email, unified communication

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“Sametime is a feature-rich environment for network-based collaboration and conferencing. It consists of the Sametime Server and client-based Sametime Connect software. Users can message each other via Sametime Connect or a Web browser, or from within Lotus Notes. Sametime Connect also can be launched directly and easily from within Microsoft Office and Outlook. All these points of entry worked well in the lab.

Sametime’s messaging interoperated seamlessly via IBM-supplied gateways with AIM, GoogleTalk and XCP.

We unreservedly and heartily recommend IBM Lotus Sametime for IM in a corporate setting. It is feature-rich, intuitive to use, highly scalable and platform neutral.”

Strangely – Microsoft opted not to participate in the review.

Technorati Tags: Sametime, Enterprise IM

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What comes as somewhat of a surprise is that many companies state an insufficient business case as the main reason for not deploying corporate IM, outweighing concerns over cost, security and content control. The article notes:

“IM and presence are today where e-mail was some time around 1995. Back then, you could still find people who were not convinced of the efficacy of e-mail in improving communications and who simply couldn’t come up with a business case for deploying it – today, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who does not believe in the value of e-mail for business communications.”

I agree with Michael’s assertion that corporate IM can provide a real competitive advantage if used in an integrated and innovative fashion.

“Second, organizational decision-makers will need to be proactive in understanding what IM and presence can do. As I’ve said before, e-mail’s ubiquity means that organizations can no longer gain any sort of competitive advantage from it. However, that is not the case with IM and presence – innovative use of IM and presence can speed organizational decision-making, provide better customer service, etc., in ways that can provide real competitive advantage simply because many of your competitors are probably not yet using these capabilities.“

As noted in previous posts, enterprise IM is here to stay. Companies must look beyond “chat” to realize the benefits of presence integration and instant collaboration.

Technorati Tags: Enterprise IM, Osterman Research, Unified Communication

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In a press release published last week, Gartner forecasts that IM will become the medium of choice for voice, video and text chat by the end of 2011.

For many knowledge workers, instant messaging (IM) is as critical as having access to a telephone or to e-mail and enterprises that haven’t already done so should start incorporating IM into their critical business processes immediately, Gartner said today. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2011, IM will be the de facto tool for voice, video and text chat with 95 percent of workers in leading global organisations using it as their primary interface for real-time communications by 2013. The worldwide market for enterprise IM is forecast to grow from $267 million in 2005 to $688 million in 2010.

The analyst firm further predicts that predominant consumer IM services such as AOL, Yahoo! and MSN Messenger will be replaced by behind-the-firewall Enterprise IM solution that provide secure and reliable communications within the enterprise while connecting to the public networks through monitored federation services. During the transition, Enterprise IM is expected to grow from it current 25% to 100% penetration within the next four years.

Gartner also touches on some of the issues surrounding security and compliance that are consistent with the recommendations I made in a previous blog post.

Technorati Tags: Gartner, Forrester, Enterprise IM, instant messaging, sametime, lcs, IM hygiene

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The rules covering electronic communication typically spell out the terms of use, appropriate and permissible content and usage limits or restrictions. These rules are driven by HR and business policy and more often follow specific regulatory and compliance requirements that must be monitored and enforced.

What is somewhat surprising is that the monitoring and enforcement function, in many cases, is the responsibility of corporate IT, often without being given the proper authority to act on violations. Michael Osterman of Osterman Research recently wrote about this issue in his blog, quoting this particular incident:

“One of the panelists in a session on content filtering and encryption told us about her experience when responding to someone who had violated a company policy on inappropriate content being sent through email. This panelist, a senior IT manager, reminded the individual about the corporate policy, to which the offender replied, “Bite Me!”. The individual who offered this less-than-appropriate response is no longer employed at that company.”

Anybody who has ever worked in IT can probably relate and may recall similar encounters. The issues of contention surrounding email are plentiful:

• Exceeding of message size and mailbox storage quotas,
• Emailing of inappropriate content,
• Email overuse for personal purposes,
• Illegal message forwarding, and
• Other disruptive user activities.

Companies are well advised to remove IT from the thankless role of the policy messenger. It leads to employee burnout and can create a hostile work environment.

Instead, regulatory and HR violations should be routed automatically to the appropriate business manager with the proper authority to enact on the rules.

The same applies to core IT policies such as quotas. Rather than having IT chase individual offenders, firms should implement technology solutions that can automatically enforce IT policy while offering alternatives that enable employees to get their work done.

Technorati Tags: email policy, best practices, osterman research, inappropriate conduct

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“Though Wall Street has learned the consequences of paying too little attention to messages zipping through its corporate pipelines, other ways of communicating have cropped up faster than regulators have been able to address them.”

Although the specific guidelines are not yet published, the general principle is to implement solutions to monitor all text based electronic communications.

This also means prohibiting the use of personal email and instant messaging in order to prevent  bypassing the enterprises monitoring solutions. Some firms already block access to personal email web sites and suggest limiting the use of personal cellphones.

Technorati Tags: email monitoring, wall street, compliance, risk management, electronic communication, NYSE, NASD

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