Email Management

Because email servers have a fixed size, when storage limits approach, performance begins to decrease, backup times increase making it nearly impossible to meet service level agreements. In response, many email (Exchange) administrators have been forced to impose mailbox limits on their users. As these users reach their quotas, they may delete email and possibly destroy valuable records in the process or circumvent quota limits by storing data in local .PST files (where data is easily lost and is not accessible). For IT budgets, the problems become worse with time and the justification for additional hardware and storage becomes more difficult.

LiveOffice helps IT teams to get their email storage under control. With hosted email archiving, administrators can offload the storage burden to give their users an infinite mailbox capacity while maintaining mailbox quotas on Exchange Server. Now, administrators can lift user storage quotas and keep their Exchange server streamlined with only a smaller subset of "active" data.

Personal archive access, a standard feature of LiveOffice Mail Archive, lets end users search and view archived email – and attachments -- directly within Outlook with an integrated Outlook add -- eliminating the need to save email in PSTs, streamlining backups and increasing end-user productivity.

Managing existing PST data is a challenge for the number of PST files that exist and the total amount of data they contain. Being located on local desktops and network file servers makes them hard to access and manage. And because they sit outside the network, these email files are not protected which creates the risk of losing the valuable business information they contain. Once the files are loaded into our email archives, all message data can be managed by existing retention and disposition policies, and quickly searched through by auditors for legal discovery. It is also seamlessly accessible to all business end users. With LiveOffice's email archiving solutions, email administrators can safely eliminate the need for .PST files all together, while providing users with better, faster access to their own email data.

Is litigation readiness a concern to your business? If not, should be. A recent survey by Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P. found that 87% of U.S. corporations are in active litigation. According to Osterman Research, two-thirds of IT organizations have referred to email or IM archives or backup tapes to support their organization's innocence in a legal case. And nearly two-thirds (63%) of organizations have been ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce employee emails or instant messages.

This is not surprising when you consider that email is just as admissible in court as paper-based documents, and can be requested for legal discovery at any time. In fact, email evidence has been the smoking gun in numerous cases of illegal corporate activity. According to the American Management Association, 27% of Fortune 500 companies have defended themselves against claims of sexual harassment stemming from inappropriate emails and/or Internet use.

In most litigation time is of the essence. Normally, a strict time limit is placed on when data must be produced. For example, the SEC generally requires that requested email be produced within 48 hours of the request. Failure to produce requested email in a reasonable timeframe can result in significant fines. Without effective email archiving in place it is time-consuming, expensive to search and restore, and the backup tapes are prone to corruption as they sit in storage. With an effective email archiving solution, you can quickly search across users and data ranges for emails and attachments.

And since e-Discovery is often the most expensive part of a company's litigation your ability to quickly tag and organize millions of emails using an email archiving solution can save you thousands (and in some cases, millions) of dollars as well as put you in a much better position to defend your company. With an effective archiving solution, legal teams can then use case management tools to create collections of emails, and easily mark them as responsive, privileged, or reviewed.

Given the increasing popularity of email and IM, it's critical to clearly define and evangelize an acceptable use policy for email. An acceptable use policy defines how email should be used and can also inform your employees that company email is routinely monitored and archived. All too often, email is misused and becomes the smoking gun in business litigation (anything from sexual harassment to product liability law suits).

Since email has also become the de facto filing system for many organizations. Everything from sales proposals and marketing plans to competitor profiles, contracts, and personnel files can exist—sometimes exclusively—in an employees' inbox. And the threat of data leakage is real. Consider the case of a disgruntled employee leaving your company. Without safeguards in place, he can easily delete vital information or send proprietary company information via email to a personal email account or directly to a competitor.

If you had an email archiving solution, you can apply a customizable email policy to every email and attachment. This method automatically performs a series of actions including blocking a violating email (e.g., emails containing obscene language or specific keywords), routing a message to a reviewer, auto-classify the email, or warn users. Plus, a hosted email archiving solution, like those provided by LiveOffice, provides extensive logging and auditing tools to ensure companies provide appropriate access to reviewers to read potentially private, sensitive and confidential emails of employees.

With an effective email solution, HR and executives can directly access the archive in seconds, find "lost" emails, identify inappropriate email communications, and ensure critical business data is not lost to your competitors or unhappy employees.

Forget the hassles, headaches and expense of maintaining your own Microsoft Exchange server. For most small and medium-sized businesses, the cost and complexity of running a Microsoft Exchange server in-house is simply too much. This is why Hosted Exchange 2007 or Exchange outsourcing makes sense for businesses of all sizes and across all industries.

Instead, you can rely on a specialist IT company (like LiveOffice) who provides all the technology and support to businesses for a small monthly fee. So, companies get all the benefits of an in-house Exchange Server without the hefty price tag or IT management headache. Email simply has to work, be fast and always accessible from the road or home. Today, this means being able to access your email and calendar directly from your cell phone, BlackBerry or other mobile device, so you're never out of touch with your business.

With Hosted Exchange 2007, you can enjoy uninterrupted service, easy-to-use functionality, advanced security, and much more. With LiveOffice, you'll get the tools and administrative control you need for hassle-free business communications.