Specific new features available in Colligo Email Manager V5.2 include:

• Mark as Filed – Automatically mark an email as “Copied to SharePoint”
• Send as Attachment – Send an item from the search results as a full attachment to a new email
• Move or Copy – Email can now be moved or copied to SharePoint directly from the email inspector window
• Import Sites from Contributor – Sites can now be automatically imported from the Colligo Contributor product suite to Colligo Email Manager
• Check for Updates – Available software updates can be checked within Colligo Email Manager

The new features are designed to further improve email management in SharePoint and provide an even more seamless integration of Outlook and SharePoint. If you’re using a previous version of Colligo Email Manager, please visit the Colligo Download page to get the new version.

Matthias Bandemer, Ernst & Young

The iPad invasion is here, ready or not. Used for an increasingly wide range of business applications, iPads can be found at every level, from executives to assistants, board members to sales teams. With workplace use skyrocketing, these devices – whether corporate-sanctioned or personally-owned – present security, compliance, and legal challenges that cannot be ignored. Is your organization prepared?

Join Ernst & Young’s mobile data security expert, Matthias Bandemer, as he explores the security challenges presented by mobile devices in the workplace, with a focus on leveraging your existing SharePoint infrastructure to secure corporate data on the iPad.

Joining Matthias is Colligo’s CEO, Barry Jinks, and Director of Product Management, Trevor Dyck, who will provide valuable insight on integrating iPads into your enterprise SharePoint environment.

Register now for the live webinar on February 22 at 8AM Pacific (11AM Eastern, 4PM GMT). In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• Strategies and techniques for securing enterprise data on mobile devices
• Balancing the mobile user experience with IT and security requirements
• Replacing consumer-grade file sharing services such as Dropbox with SharePoint
• Increasing security and simplifying administration using tools such as MDMs and Colligo Administrator
• Securely accessing and storing SharePoint content on an iPad using Colligo Briefcase

Enterprises that embrace the iPad and other mobile devices report significant productivity gains. This webinar will give you the strategy, tools, and techniques to capitalize on this trend and securely integrate iPads into your SharePoint environment.

Even if you can’t make the date, register now and we’ll be sure to send you the on-demand link following the live event. We look forward to seeing you at the webinar.

Bill England

This series of blog posts looks at seven best practices to consider when implementing email records management in your organization. It discusses various considerations for evaluating email records management strategies and the challenges to fully integrating email into a records management environment. In part five, we’ll look at best practice #7 regarding the benefits of metadata tagging and provide some concluding points for organizations to consider in their email management strategy.

7. Tag tag tag

Most users spent a significant amount of time everyday searching for (and not finding) information. Effective content tagging, whether it’s for email or other types of content, is what drives effective search, eDiscovery and general findability.

When it comes to tagging email, automate whenever possible and if you can’t automate the process, then keep the interaction as light as possible. Use techniques like drop-down menus, pick lists, type-a-head, enterprise managed metadata (EMM) and term stores, in order to make tagging easy.

In terms of SharePoint, take advantage of SharePoint’s extensive taxonomy/folksonomy capabilities. The more time you spend on setting up a proper taxonomy on the back-end, the less time your users will have to spend wondering how to tag something properly on the front-end.

Tagging really is the “carrot” for your users – do this well and you’ll reduce the amount of time they spend searching for information. For the Records Manager, effective tagging can drive your organization’s retention/disposition processes and make eDiscovery much easier and efficient.

Conclusion

While there certainly are many best practices for email records management, this blog series has covered some of the key lessons that we have learned from the field and the issues constantly encountered by our customers.

The bottom line is that email is an integral part of the modern work environment and organizations need to have policies, procedures and tools in place to appropriately handle, retain and dispose of email. To do otherwise is to expose your organization to potential litigation, liability and other unpleasantries.  While this may seem ominous, accepting this exposure is the first step towards creating an email records management solution that meets the needs of both your organization and users.

Click here to read post #1 in the series.

Click here to read post #2 in the series.

Click here to read post #3 in the series.

Click here to read post #4 in the series.

Bill England

This series of blog posts looks at seven best practices to consider when implementing email records management in your organization. It discusses various considerations for evaluating email records management strategies and the challenges to fully integrating email into a records management environment. In part four, we’ll discuss best practices #5 and #6 regarding leveraging your existing Microsoft investment and creating an effective process for email records management.

5. Leverage your Existing Microsoft Investment

If your organization is already a Microsoft shop, with an enterprise agreement for Exchange, SharePoint, and Office, you already have almost everything you need to create an effective email records management solution.

In the current economic environment, both CIOs and CFOs are looking to control IT costs and provide demonstrable evidence of ROI on existing IT infrastructure investments, such as the investment already made in the Microsoft solution stack.  Making the recommendation to leverage your existing Microsoft investment by utilizing what you already own not only makes good financial sense, but is also a good career move

Falling out of this best practice is the suggestion not to deploy an email records management strategy that creates separate repositories for email versus other documents.  Having two separate repositories will not only will it impact your eDiscovery costs, but it’ll create two processes that your employees will have to learn (with two separate interfaces) for creating records.

SharePoint is a central repository that can handle email, documents and pretty much whatever other content types that you’ll need to store as a record. And with SharePoint, you’ll gain the added bonus of providing records management and collaboration on a single platform.

SharePoint 2010 has gone a long way to becoming a viable platform for records management with its improvements to the Records Center, its in-place records management capability, new Enterprise Managed Metadata features, improved scalability, and so on. Combined with 3^rd party Outlook integration tools, like Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook or Colligo Email Manager, organizations are able to create a robust and cost effective email records management solution on SharePoint.

6. Create a process that works the way your users work.

It’s no news to anyone that employees really don’t like change. They don’t like being forced to use a new tool or application or to follow a new process that is unfamiliar or complex. They don’t like it and they will rebel.  So, creating an email records management process that works they way they are used to working is a key best practice that will pay dividends for your organization.

Almost everyone lives in Outlook these days, so why not make it the main interface to the email records management system?  By combining SharePoint with a third party Outlook integration tool like Colligo Email Manager, you can leverage the familiar user experience of Outlook with its drag-and-drop capabilities and standard folder tree structure, to easily move email into the records management system. Another important feature is the ability to view SharePoint right inside of Outlook, so that users don’t need to change to a browser – or “context switch” – in order to access SharePoint.

Another important point for this best practice is to automate the process as much as possible. The less your employees need to interact with the system, the better. So ensuring that they can easily or, even better, automatically capture the metadata needed to drive compliance, eDiscovery and records management requirements is important.  This could include auto-extraction of metadata or automatic appending default metadata on items saved to a particular folder.  And if you can’t automate it, make it simple.

In the final blog post, we’ll look at the best practice #7 regarding the benefits of metadata tagging and provide some concluding points for organizations to consider in their email management strategy.

Click here to read post #1 in the series.

Click here to read post #2 in the series.

Click here to read post #3 in the series.

The client had set up an intranet, team and collaboration sites, and an extranet.  Aside from some MOSS to SharePoint 2010 migration issues resulting from heavy customization on their legacy site, the project was completed with no serious technical hurdles.

The most interesting part of the discussion revolved around how they achieved their adoption and engagement success.

First, credit was given to the communications team that brought on early adopters and championed the organizational change from file shares to SharePoint. It’s always a good strategy to have a solid team promoting the project.

Second, their initial SharePoint roll-out was an internal “Buy and Sell” style classified ads site which leveraged search, metadata, lists and other basic SharePoint features.  This site proved to be very popular, widely-used and served to educate and engage the user community on SharePoint. This was a success story and approach I had not heard before.  Well done!

Have a unique success story regarding your SharePoint deployment? Send them to us and we’ll help you spread the word!

Bill England

This series of blog posts looks at seven best practices to consider when implementing email records management in your organization. It discusses various considerations for evaluating email records management strategies and the challenges to fully integrating email into a records management environment. In part three, we’ll discuss best practices #3 and #4 regarding the pervasiveness of email in records management scenarios and an effective organizational strategy to manage email.

3. Assume every employee is creating records and every email is a possible record.

This is such an important concept, that it’s better to think of it as a mantra than simply a best practice. Assume that everyone in your organization creates records and every email (and attachment) is a possible record.

The fact is that you simply do not know beforehand what email could turn into a “smoking gun.”  You have to consider that every email could be a “smoking gun.”  And remember, a deleted email or an email that couldn’t be found, can be just as damaging.

So a good mantra for your email management strategy is: “Everyone creates records, every email is a possible record.” And this mantra affects every part of your email management strategy including the design of the system itself and what tools and processes you use to implement it.

4. Deploy a three zone email management approach.

A three zone email management approach is a framework recommended by DocuLabs, Gimmal, and many others in terms of how to handle email in a records management context.

Zone One
Zone one email are the regular email that everyone gets every day. Some are records, some could be records, but most are probably of the “read-and-delete” variety. In zone one, unless the employee explicitly indicates otherwise, these email are automatically deleted after a set period of time, usually 90 days. This auto-delete policy will cause resistance from staff that are used to keeping email in their Inbox indefinitely.

Zone Two
Zone two email are defined as email with corporate value but which have yet to be declared as records. This zone is like email purgatory, in that some action needs to be taken on them in a set amount of time, usually one year. Either they get declared as records, or they get deleted.

Zone Three
Zone three email are defined as records that need to be moved into an enterprise records repository and have some kind of policy placed on them for retention, disposition, eDiscovery, etc. These are email records that need to be managed properly.

The corollary to this three zone email management best practice is to block alternative storage options (with auto email deletion on Exchange, removal of PST and Exchange Public Folders, company policies, etc.) and make zone two readily accessible and easy to use.

In the three zone email management approach, zone one storage is usually Outlook/Exchange, whereas for Zone two and three we recommend using SharePoint (if you have deployed SharePoint) or your existing ECM or records management system, rather than a standalone email archiving solution or Exchange Managed Folders. Keeping email records together with other content types is a recommended strategy that SharePoint is capable of providing.

In my next blog post, we’ll look at another two best practices for email records management: leveraging your existing Microsoft investment and creating a process that works the way your users work.

Click here to read post #1 in the series.

Click here to read post #2 in the series.

Dan Vasey, Charter Communications

Our recent webinar, “Enterprise Information Management with SharePoint 2010: Secrets to Success” was a great success and attracted a huge worldwide audience of records managers as well as SharePoint professionals.  If you didn’t get a chance to attend the live event, you can now view the on-demand version.

In the webinar, Dan Vasey, Director of Records & Information Management at Fortune 500 cable operator, Charter Communications, shared the strategy, methods, and tools that enabled his organization to successfully deploy the Charter Online Information Network, an enterprise-wide SharePoint 2010 based solution for records and information management. Dan was joined by Ben Henderson, Solutions Specialist at Colligo Networks, who discussed best practices for SharePoint email management and accessing SharePoint content offline.

To view this very popular and informative webinar on-demand including access to the webinar slide deck, click here.

During the live webinar, we received many good questions from the audience. All of the questions along with their answers are provided below:

Questions for Dan Vasey, Charter Communications

Do you have anything documented in terms of governance on SharePoint? When to use the product, when it becomes over extended, when not to use it?

SharePoint governance can be a tricky topic; mostly because everyone has a different definition of governance.  We do have a governance document but unfortunately I am not able to share it outside the organization.  Having said this, I can share with you some of my general approaches for governance relating to your question.

1. Our strategy is to keep information management simple.  Provide a limited number of locations for information to be stored and make sure users can access these stores.  We chose SharePoint as our primary storage location for unstructured documents.

2. You also need to clearly define the rules for using the solution, including when and how to use it.  For example, we require a content type (actually it is a managed metadata field in SharePoint) for each document that is saved to SharePoint.  This content type controls access and retention lifecycle.

How long did it take you to implement this solution and what was the greatest challenge you had to address?

We are still in the process of implementing the solution across the enterprise.  Given the complexity of our environment and number of users, we chose to implement the solution on a department by department basis.  We chose this strategy mostly because of the change management and clean up efforts required.

The most challenging aspect of the project to-date is trying to get people to adjust to a different way of storing and retrieving information.  Most of our users were using network drives with deep tree structures.  They were used to drilling through folders to find information.  Metadata in SharePoint takes the place of complex tree structures and helps to flatten the taxonomy.  This can be helpful but also a bit scary for a user in the beginning.  Many of our users were anxious and had to learn to trust the search capabilities of SharePoint.  This is an ongoing issue that we will have to continue to address by ensuring accurate search results, providing proper training and communication.

 How do you organize unstructured data in SharePoint including email?

Our unstructured data is organized into three different site collections depending on the kind of collaboration that needs to take place.  We use MySites, department (team) sites and project sites.  Since the content type and other metadata (including full text search) drives the lifecycle management and search, the site a user chooses to store data in drives how they will collaborate with others.  Email is a bit unique because it has its own metadata fields.  We have created specific email template libraries for users to use on any site collection so they can store email separately if they wish.  It’s not a requirement but because the default view includes columns unique to email (sent to, received from etc.)

Questions for Ben Henderson, Colligo Networks

We currently host our SharePoint outside of our environment, on a different Active Directory structure.  Is the type of integration being discussed here an option or does the SharePoint Server need to be in the same environment as your Exchange environment?

The SharePoint server does not need to be within the same domain as Active Directory as you can provide specific credentials when connecting to the SharePoint site.

In SharePoint, you can email to a list having the right settings. Does Colligo Email Manager add that support in an Office 365 environment?

Colligo Email Manager does not add the ability to email to a document Library. This is out of the box functionality with SharePoint which currently, for security reasons, is not available in Office365. Colligo Email Manager doesn’t require the lists to be email enabled. You can create columns to map email metadata, however this isn’t a requirements and it would work well with an out-of-the- box Document Library.

Does Colligo Email Manager work in a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)?

In short – Yes. Colligo Email Manager does work within a VDI although I have seen many different types of these and some are more complex than others and hence, more problematic. You should contact sales@colligo.com and speak to a Sales Engineer who will be able to discuss your particular requirements and see how best we can support your environment.

Can I host my files on my local server and just have SharePoint link to them, so that my users will not have to use the server folder and just use SharePoint for all files?

I believe what you are looking for here is a solution that presents items within SharePoint to the user and when they click on the item they are viewing the item on your server and not on SharePoint. If this is the case then the Colligo solution won’t meet your requirements, and I feel that what might be your best option is to have the SharePoint Search capability index your local server so that when people use the search on SharePoint it will surface these folders.

Re-tagging emails with metadata. How is this done for bulk copies? Can you define values to be used across multiple messages?

When moving items to SharePoint with Colligo Email Manager, you can move more than one item and then specify the metadata on each item, a number of items, or all of the items. Anything that you specify will overwrite the values for the selected emails, but this feature is very useful when you have custom metadata and bulk move items that all relate to the same topic.

Printing from iPad – Do you have a solution or do you rely on users having deployed another product to enable this? Also, do you support Android?

In regards to Colligo Briefcase, we don’t have our own solution for printing but will support other applications that enable this functionality. You can also open the documents in 3rd party applications. For Android applications we have this pencilled in on our roadmap, and it will depend largely on customer feedback and demand.

Colligo Contributor is nice, but in my experience (I installed a trial) it appears to only map to one site at a time to Windows Explorer. SharePoint does this OOTB. What we’re looking for is the ability to navigate through a hierarchy of SharePoint sites in Windows Explorer.

Currently when adding sites using the Colligo Contributor interfaces, such as the Colligo Contributor Client, you need to map one site at a time, and these sites all appear at the same level. With our newer product, Colligo Email Manager, you can navigate through sites to sub-sites. Within File Manager (the Windows Explorer integration piece within Colligo Contributor) you will need to add each site individually. What SharePoint doesn’t do out of the box is prompt for metadata and then check the item in. If your document library has metadata requirements on it then using the out of the box functionality will leave document checked out and other users will not be able to see this.

Any products for Mac?

Colligo Contributor and Colligo Email Manager only work within a Windows environment and an Outlook email client. However, we are releasing a product for iPad called Colligo Briefcase.

Can you disable the offline storage of documents? I would prefer docs to stay in SharePoint.

Yes, using the Colligo Email Manager product, all content including documents and email is stored in SharePoint. For Colligo Contributor File Manager, which provides a Windows Explorer interface, the documents are required to be taken offline. This improves the speed of opening and saving the documents, and Colligo will make the changes to the SharePoint site when a synchronisation next occurs. The synchronisation happens in the background to give the users the best experience of dealing with their SharePoint documents. The documents that are cached can be filtered on Folder or SharePoint view so that you can store on the documents that you are working on.

Will Colligo work with all email platforms such as Lotus Notes?

Using Colligo Contributor File Manager, content from Lotus Notes can be opened and saved to SharePoint from Lotus Notes.  Colligo Email Manager and Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook only work within a Windows environment and an Outlook email client.

Does Colligo have capability to automatically name non-email files when dragging and dropping using Windows Explorer to avoid duplicate file names?

When you drag and drop using Colligo Contributor File Manager, you are prompted for a Name and a Title, these are the default metadata values in a standard Document Library in SharePoint. Colligo gives you the option to rename these. If you choose not to and an item already exists with this name, you will be prompted to provide a resolution. That resolution could be to change the file name.

Does Colligo Administrator allow you to push out installs of Colligo products to desktops?

Colligo Administrator doesn’t do the pushing of the software; I expect that most large organisations have an SMS software distribution application that will do the deploying of the software, the Colligo Administrator configures the software so that users don’t need to configure the application on the desktop, it will already be set up and ready to start using.

Will Colligo Briefcase work with Android?

Colligo Briefcase currently supports iPad only. We would love to talk to you further about your Android requirements, please contact Sales at sales@colligo.com.

We have opened up Corporate User Devices and now support Blackberry, IPhone, and Android phones.  So what’s Colligo’s roadmap or level of support?

Currently our support is limited to the iPad, however we would love to talk to you further about your other device requirements as it pertains to our roadmap – please contact Sales directly at sales@colligo.com.

Bill England, Colligo

This series of blog posts looks at seven best practices to consider when implementing email records management in your organization. It discusses various considerations for evaluating email records management strategies and the challenges to fully integrating email into a records management environment. In part two, we discuss two important best practices: understanding the scope of the problem and building a business case.

1. Understand the scope of the problem.

As a very first step, you need understand the scope of the email problem in your organization. This means understanding all the places where emails are being stored today.  The usual suspects include .pst and .ost files, Exchange Public Folders, Exchange Managed Folders, and file shares. These really are the skeletons in the closet that must be addressed early on in the planning phase.

But not only do you have to figure out where email is being stored, but why are they being stored there. Are some groups creating project folders in Exchange where they share email? Are some users storing everything in a PST so that they have access to all their email when they are travelling? Are users archiving PST files to their file share because they hit their PST size limit?

Understanding the scope of the problem comes down to doing some serious detective work to figure out the where, the why and the how.

2. Build a business case

Building a business case means understanding the costs associated with your current email strategy, the cost of eDiscovery and the legal consequences of not managing email properly. This information and data is part of the business case needed in order to get the resources to create and implement an effective email records management strategy.

eDiscovery becomes even more expensive when you need to search multiple repositories. Deploying an effective email records management strategy that reduces number of repositories to search will subsequently lower eDiscovery costs.  Also, deploying a strategy that reduces the amount of email you need to store and search, will again lower costs, and provide more effective legal holds and better compliance.

If you need further ammunition to get the resources to implement effective email records management in your organization, here are just a few high profile court cases related to lost or mismanaged email that resulted in multi-million dollar settlements:

• In 2006, if Morgan Stanley had been able to locate and produce all their email in one case, they may have avoided a $15M fine.  In this case, Morgan Stanley was heavily punished by the judge for consistently failing to produce email records during the discovery process.  On several occasions, employees at Morgan Stanley found tape backups of email records related to the case even after the company signed statements stating that they had turned over all relevant records. Morgan Stanley had no consistent process in place for managing the flow of information in email, and this significantly affected the case.
• In 2005, during a lawsuit by AMD over monopoly allegations, Intel executives’ “lost” email significantly affected their defence – executives thought all email were being backed up by IT, even deleted email. Some employee email was lost because workers failed to move messages from their “Sent” folder into other folders and it was automatically deleted, while other email were lost because Intel failed to notify hundreds of employees to retain email related to the case. This suit was settled for $1.25B.
• In a 2007 patent lawsuit between Qualcomm and its rival Broadcom, the judge was very critical of Qualcomm’s inability to easily identify all the relevant email records related to the case. The court felt so strongly about enforcing the rules of eDiscovery that it ordered the 14 lawyers who had worked on the case for Qualcomm to appear at a hearing to explain each one why he or she should not be sanctioned personally. This suit was eventually settled for $891M.

In my next blog post, we’ll look at another two important best practices for email records management: the pervasiveness of email in records management scenarios and an effective organizational strategy to manage email records.

Click here to read post #1 in the series.

Trevor Dyck, Colligo

In a recent blog article  by über SharePoint MVP Dan Holmes, Dan discusses a very common issue that directly affects SharePoint usability and end-user adoption: the issue of SharePoint navigation across several site collections. This issue becomes even more complex when you need to access different sites that might be hosted both on-premise and in the cloud, and might require different credentials. As Dan discussed, navigating to these sites quickly and easily using the “out of the box” web browser functionality of SharePoint can be problematic for end-users, but fortunately, we have a great solution.

Colligo’s client solutions for email and document management in SharePoint were custom-made to address the manageability and usability issue of SharePoint navigation head-on.  Each of Colligo’s interfaces provides an extremely easy way for a user to navigate to a particular SharePoint site, regardless of whether that site is located on-premise, in the cloud or a hybrid environment.

With our Outlook interfaces (both the Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook and our Colligo Email Manager product), folders from different SharePoint sites are integrated right inside the Outlook Folder tree, providing very simple and intuitive access to the site. When a user is connected to the network, simply clicking on one of the connected SharePoint folders in the folder tree, brings up a browser view of that SharePoint site (or document library) right inside of Outlook. With the caching feature of the Contributor Add-In, even if a user isn’t connected to the site, they still can view and access the cached version of the document library inside Outlook.

With the Window Explorer interface provided by our Colligo Contributor File Manager product, SharePoint sites are easily accessible via the Navigation Pane inside Windows Explorer itself. Selecting a SharePoint site that is connected in Windows Explorer enables users to access all the advanced SharePoint features such as metadata, content types, and document templates, while adding and editing files using familiar desktop operations inside Windows Explorer. Again, Colligo simplifies site navigation but this time, inside of Windows Explorer.

(A brief aside: have you ever tried to move or copy an entire SharePoint document library from one SharePoint site to another? A nightmare, right? Wrong! Colligo File Manager solves this problem too by enabling users to simply copy an entire document library from one site to another, along with all the accompanying metadata.)

Our standalone application for accessing SharePoint offline, the popular Colligo Contributor Client, again provides a really easy way for users to navigate SharePoint sites, regardless of their location. This time, access to different SharePoint sites is via a pull down menu in the Contributor Client, making navigation fast, simple and pain-free for the user.

If you want to really make it easy for users to navigate to different SharePoint sites, why not push those sites out to them directly so that they show up automatically in the interface of their choosing?

Imagine a user launching their Outlook one morning and automatically seeing all the SharePoint sites and folders they need to access showing up in their Outlook folder tree. A pipe dream, right? Wrong again!  With our new Colligo Administrator product, SharePoint sites and even specific document libraries can be automatically pushed out to users and fine- tuned to meet their particular needs. And it doesn’t take the IT department to do this, non-technical staff, such as records managers and other business data owners, can easily deploy and manage Colligo software from within a SharePoint interface.

Yes, SharePoint navigation can be difficult, but fortunately Colligo is here to help. Making SharePoint easier to use is our mantra, and making it easier drives end-user adoption and engagement. Simple if you think about it.

Bill England

This series of blog posts looks at seven best practices to consider when implementing email records management in your organization. It discusses various considerations for evaluating email records management strategies and the challenges to fully integrating email into a records management environment. In part one, we discuss email in a records management context and some of the questions that need to be addressed for effective email records management.

Email in a Records Management Context

If your business is conducted by email (and whose isn’t these days?), then the content of these email must be retained and managed like any other record. In many cases, it’s the email itself that must be retained as a record, sometimes it’s the attachment, often it’s both, but the message is clear: email are records and need to be managed as such.

However, the 2011 AIIM State of the Industry Survey offers some startling statistics:

• 66%  of records managers have concerns about information accuracy and accessibility, particularly with regard to email
• 15% delete all email over a certain age, whereas 16% keep them indefinitely. 27% have no policy
• 31% describe their management of email as “chaotic”
• 39% are still filing important email in personal Outlook folders
• 18% automatically capture email to document or records management systems
• Since we have a lot of experience in the SharePoint world, it’s interesting to note that only 20% of companies store email in SharePoint.

There is a big gap between knowing what needs to be done, and actually doing it. Organizations need to get a handle on email in a way that meets compliance and legal requirements within tight financial constraints. And importantly, they need to do it without negatively impacting employee productivity. Employees are already being asked to do more with less, so any additional responsibilities and requirements must be easily integrated into their daily work processes, habits and applications.

Regarding email records management, organizations need to address two important questions:

• How do you align email management practices with corporate records management strategy, while keeping end users happy and deployment costs low?
• How do you balance the needs of IT and the Records Manager with the needs of the user?

In my next blog post, we’ll look at the first two best practices for effective email records management.