Does your company archive its email? If the answer is no, why not? You may think that your email is one aspect of your business that does not require any sort of special attention. However, email is becoming more important, and more detailed than ever before. Learn about what email archiving is, why it is necessary to improve the workplace communication flow and how you can implement an archiving system. Then you can relax with the confidence that your important electronic correspondence is safe and protected.
What is Email Archiving?
With all the mail your business uses, how important could it be in the future to be able to find and access an old message? Archiving email is more than just backing it up. Archiving means the emails are saved in an easy-to-access form, often with a searchable database. According to a Search Storage blog post, 60 percent of their readers are archiving emails, but of those people, only 19 percent are using a separate archiving tool. This can be a bit troubling, since relying on a built-in or bundled tool could leave you out in the cold. Especially once you understand the importance of archiving mail in the first place.
Why is Email Archiving Necessary?
Email is used for more than just casual conversations. Since email is a vital workplace and marketing tool, you need a backup, restore and search tool so you can access these communications when necessary. Your exact reasons for needing an email archive may vary, but InfoStor offers these five considerations:
- Legal Considerations: If you find your firm involved in a lawsuit, an email archive can be a vital tool to proving your case.
- Regulatory Compliance: Certain accounting acts, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act require that proper records are kept. Emails can stand for these records in many cases.
- Search Capability: While you could simply save all your emails, without a good archiving program, searching them and finding what you need can be impossible.
- Knowledge Management: This can help you find and manage important information about your firm that would otherwise become lost.
- Storage Management: Trying to save your emails without a good archiving program can be a huge drain on your storage capabilities. Email archiving makes this much easier.
Can Email improve Workplace Communications and Morale?
Gallup’s 2013 survey “State of the Workplace” shows that only 30 percent of employees are engaged. Archived email is a good way to look into employee engagement and make changes. Managers who take the time to communicate with employees and employees who engage in intra office emails are more likely to have this engagement that improves overall communications and morale. After all, more engaged employees are likely to be happier in their jobs.
Once you understand the importance of email archiving, you probably want to implement an archiving system for your business. Every business has different needs, so spend some time evaluating yours before making a decision. When you choose a service, think about all the factors — not just the price. If you have a high volume of internal, sales and marketing emails you may need a different email hosting service from someone who only needs to archive a few emails per day. Another big factor is uptime. If your emails are archived in the cloud, you want to be able to access the emails when necessary. Finally, look into how the search function works. If you need a detailed database, a simple search may not work for your needs. Keep all of these factors in mind and you can choose the perfect solution for your email archiving needs — and have access to the valuable data that is “hiding” in those old emails.
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