Roger Matus, a colleague of mine, and fellow blogger even declares that “BlackBerry Gets It Wrong” on his DeathbyEmail blog.  I respectfully disagree.  Blackberry has become a household name by building a huge following in the enterprise. One of the reasons for the success is the robust back-end called Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES). With BES, companies can implement mobile IT policies that address the all-important corporate security and compliance needs.

Over the last few years, RIM has been keen on expanding its market beyond the enterprise into the broader consumer space, offering many slick new phones such as the Pearl and Curve, and providing integration with consumer email services as well. It just seems logical to add a device to the line-up that can compete with the iPhone, which will be a huge design and engineering challenge for RIM nonetheless.  There are many mobile applications, other than email, (e.g. web browsing, maps, etc.) that hugely benefit from the large screen without the keyboard.

Let’s remember, unlike Apple’s one-trick pony, RIM offers plenty of other phones to choose from. If you don’t like the touch-screen you can pick one with a keyboard!

I’ll have to wait and see if this new phone is right for me. I’ve tried the iPhone and admit that the touch-screen takes some practice for fast typing. RIM is planning to improve the typing experience by providing tactile response.

I’m also testing a new service on my current Blackberry, called myCaption, The service allows me to speak my emails directly into the phone. It is still a little slow but provides amazingly good speech recognition results. Who knows, I may not need a keyboard for typing emails much longer after all…

Technorati Tags: Blackberry Thunder, iPhone, RIM, Blackberry 9530

Last week’s outage at Google, recent repeat problems at Amazon’s S3 storage services and Apple’s “insanely grating” MobileMe launch highlight the need to carefully consider all aspects when weighing hosted vs. on-premise solutions.

Cost reduction is typically a key motivator, especially for smaller and non-tech companies, when eying a utility or SaaS model for email.  Jason Brooks at eWeek Labs wrote an article last week that lists five key issues to consider when evaluating a hosted email service.  Jason’s list was a good start, but missed a few key issues - specifically around security and compliance. Here’s my extended version:

1. Control - Outsourcing email may significantly limit the control over data and users. Many companies have extensive regulatory requirements such as content control, data leakage protection (DLP), Chinese walls / ethical firewalls and content archiving, that are not yet addressed by hosted solutions.
   -> Don’t forget to check your company’s specific requirements.
2. Security – Email has become the primary communication medium for business. Corporate messaging systems host a wealth of proprietary and confidential information, which typically doesn’t leave the corporate network. Hosted services will have to provide extensive encryption, data access security and audit capabilities before enterprise customers will even consider moving this data outside their corporate firewall.
   -> Make sure all your corporate legal, risk management, and compliance needs are satisfied by the services offered.
3. Performance – Moving user’s mailboxes into the cloud typically means drastically increased WAN traffic. Many companies have learned this the hard way while consolidating mail servers behind the firewall. A bandwidth upgrade to the Internet pipe is most likely a requirement to guarantee reasonable response times and happy users.
   -> Make sure to plan for peak-hour bandwidth needs.
4. Reliability – Service availability/reliability depends mainly on two factors for hosted email:  service uptime and connectivity.  Hosted services are still weak on SLA commitments and proactive monitoring/notification of service outages. Connectivity problems can cut off users from their data possibly for an extended period of time, as few (smaller) companies have redundant Internet access in place.
   -> Consider deploying multiple access paths, and review service level commitments and planned downtime schedules carefully.
5. Integration – Email should really not be treated as an isolated messaging service. The premise of unified communication is starting to deliver on its potential. Many companies are already deploying integrated solutions that combine email, IM, eMeetings, telephony and presence with other collaborative applications, and even with traditional enterprise software such as CRM and ERP. None of the current hosted offerings can provide such feature-rich capabilities yet. Furthermore, any existing integration points may be severed or will be costly to reestablish with a hosted service.
   -> Carefully review the integration between your existing email and other enterprise apps, and evaluate possible barriers for future integration and unified messaging plans.
6. Scalability – Many users are already complaining about mailbox and message size restrictions imposed on their on-premise systems. Hosted solutions will have similar limitations although typically driven by cost considerations.
   -> Make sure to evaluate the needs of your power users.
7. Cost – The promise of significant cost reduction is often the most compelling reason to consider a hosted solution. All of the issues listed above play into the cost model, and critical cost drivers such as necessary bandwidth upgrades and premiums paid for power users are often overlooked in the initial assessment.
   -> List all requirements and all current costs associated with providing the on-premise services for a thorough comparison to the hosted service.

Technorati Tags: hosted email, SaaS, hosted service

“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

“When you’re done with your email queue, are you done?
Do you spend your day responding and reacting to incoming [messages] all day… until the list is empty? … and then you’re done.“

This is a great follow-up to the discussion at IORG a few weeks ago.

• About 12% of the average worker’s time is spent thinking or reflecting, while 28% of time is consumed by disruptions  from things that aren’t urgent  or important,  like unnecessary email messages and the time it takes to get back on track. (Jonathan Spira, Basex)
• Employees at Intel spend about 20 hours per week managing email, 2 hours of which is unnecessary email. (Nathan Zeldes, Intel)

New social media with its constant chatter of invites, pings and pokes seems to exacerbate the problem.

Is most of your day consumed by simply processing information, rather than initiating, reaching out, inventing and designing?

Technorati Tags: email productivity, information overload

IORG – the Information Overload Research Group was founded earlier this year by a group of industry experts and research analysts to address the growing concern of continued information overload, the negative impact on worker productivity and the resulting “burn-out” of today’s knowledge workers.

I have covered this important issue in previous blog posts and it is refreshing to see that now some of the world’s leading companies and universities are dedicating resources to study the effects of information overload.

The groups goal is to share information, develop best practices and contribute to the creation of solutions to the problem as outlined in the mission statement:

“We work together to build awareness of the world’s greatest challenge to productivity, conduct research, help define best practices, contribute to the creation of solutions, share information and resources, offer guidance and facilitation, and help make the business case for fighting information overload.”

The conference started with a gala dinner, which was a great way to exchange observations, real-world experiences and new ideas with fellow attendees. The next day consisted of presentations from industry experts, and panel discussions. Jonathan Spira, the CEO of Basex, set the tone by sharing some of the hard numbers and facts in his keynote presentation. Basex estimates the annual cost of interruptions for knowledge workers at $650 billion in the United States alone.

For more details, please check out Jared Goralnick’s blog, which has an excellent summary of the event.

I am looking forward to future IORG events and as a member, Permessa is committed to contribute to the group’s mission.

Technorati Tags: email overload, information overload, information overload research group, IORG, worker productivity

My personal favorite, number 36:

“If I had to pay 42 cents to send this email, would I?”

Technorati Tags: email checklist, seth godin, email best practices, email overload

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.

This is a significant finding especially in times where tight IT budgets are strained by rapidly growing message volumes and resulting skyrocketing bandwidth & storage costs.

What this really means is that there is a huge opportunity to dramatically reduce operating costs by going after the cause of this excessive email traffic. Don’t worry, I am not proposing to fire the 1% of offending employees.

There are ways to manage email more efficiently without adversely affecting users or business operation.

Permessa just published a whitepaper (I am a co-author), titled “6 Best Practices That Reduce Email Overload and Costs”. The paper highlights areas for managing excessive email traffic, such as unnecessary reply-to-all, attachment ping-pong and the overuse of mailing lists. Some of these have been previously discussed on this blog. For each topic area the whitepaper makes best practice recommendations on how to implement email policy changes that can prevent the negative effects and help save money.

Technorati Tags: email costs, information overload, best practices to reduce email overload, permessa

“Think, for example, of all the things that must happen to a message either inbound or outbound. There is the basic transport protocol, the SMTP commands. The message itself may be encrypted, so there is encryption and decryption. The message may be signed. The message needs to be scanned for malware, for phishing, for malicious HTML. The sender of the message may be authenticated through DKIM or Sender ID, and their reputation evaluated. Regulatory compliance rules must be enforced. Company policies about the message must be enforced. Think also that multiple messages might be processed at once—sort of like superscalar processing for messages.”

While many companies leverage virtualization to increase the utilization of expensive hardware, messaging may actually be one application that can natively exploit raw processing power through massive process parallelization.

“Messaging is so core and critical to businesses these days that it has to be done right and it has to be done with reasonable performance. So bring on the CPU cores, throw memory and disk arrays at them and don’t skimp. While you’re at it, add some extra redundancy for reliability purposes. Your mail volume and the number of problems in that mail are only going to increase.”

Technorati Tags: enterprise messaging, email policy enforcement, email performance

]]> http://www.emailtide.com/2008/05/09/messaging-deserves-the-big-guns/feed/ http://www.emailtide.com/2008/05/09/messaging-deserves-the-big-guns/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Emailtide/~3/285591074/ http://www.emailtide.com/2008/05/07/new-quickr-tool-to-aid-in-fight-against-sharepoint/#comments Wed, 07 May 2008 19:48:02 +0000 Stefan Mehlhorn http://www.emailtide.com/?p=130 IBM released last week a new data migration tool intended to ease the movement of large amounts of data from existing content platforms such as SharePoint, Exchange Public Folders, Domino Document Libraries and other repositories (see coverage here, here and here). The tool also provides synchronization capabilities to enable platform coexistence during extended migration periods.

SharePoint has been a $1 Billion success for Microsoft although the platform is still struggling with enterprise-wide adoption due to integration and scalability issues. IBM Lotus is hoping to stop/slow SharePoint’s growth with Quickr’s enterprise grade scale (J2EE, WebSphere, DB2) and attractive web 2.0 features that tightly integrate not only with Lotus Notes 8 but also with Microsoft Office.

Enterprise customers will certainly benefit as this competition heats up.

Technorati Tags: quickr, sharepoint, content integration

Websense Security Labs reported first indications that CAPTCHA might be in trouble when researchers noticed unusually fast response times, of less than 6 seconds, to the CAPTCHA challenge. Check out this blog post for a detailed description how these attacks work.

Spammers are highly motivated to get their hands on free email accounts for the following reasons:

• Public mail services such as Live Mail, Gmail or Yahoo! Mail cannot be blacklisted.
• Sending email through those services is free.
• It is hard to track spammers’ criminal activity in the vast volume of other legitimate mail traffic.

The latest attack on CAPTCHA is nothing new. In the past, spammers tricked unsuspecting users to do their dirty work by redirecting captcha challenges from legitimate sites to bogus game sites where players filled out captchas to win prizes.

Let’s just hope that CAPTCHA can be improved fast enough to prevent a likely surge of spam.

Technorati Tags: spam, captcha, websense