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The rapid expansion of email usage

over the last fifty years can be seen
as one of the major technical,
scientific and sociological evolutions
of recent times. Pre-dating the
Internet and contributing significantly
to its development, email is widely
considered to be one of, if not
the, most important business
communications tools ever invented.
This eBook will explore some of the
challenges email faces in the near
future.

Radicati - the technology research firm

that has been publishing definitive email
statistics since 1993 - reports that email
usage continues to grow and will increase
its dominance in the coming years.
Their 2015 Email Statistics Report revealed
that there are currently 2.6 billion
worldwide email users and this will increase
to over 2.9 billion by 2019.
Radicati also reports that the average
business user typically receives 88 emails
per day, and this is likely to increase to 96
by 2019.
Despite its global dominance, email
faces challenges around information
overload and the way messages are
currently stored and managed.
These limits have less to do with
fundamental problems of email technology
and more to do with the way most
organizations and service providers
currently use email to communicate.

Whats wrong
with business
email today?

In the vast majority of

organizations, email remains the
primary method of exchanging
unstructured information
with colleagues, partners and
customers. It is widely used for:
Exchanging messages
Professional correspondence
Delegating and managing tasks
Sharing documents
Requesting and managing work
orders

Over the last thirty years, most

companies have replaced paper
archives with electronic document
management systems such as
SharePoint, which is used in 80% of
F500 companies. In the electronic world,
official documents such as proposals,
contracts, and product specifications
are stored in these systems.
However, largely for technological
reasons, email is stored separately
in email systems, such as Microsoft
Exchange or Googles Gmail.
This dichotomy has led to a breakdown
in information management; creating
confusion and incoherence, while
placing an enormous burden on the
company to find relevant information
quickly for audits, discovery, and
compliance needs.

Why do we
separate email
from other
documents?
The worlds most popular office productivity and
collaboration providers such as Microsoft, Google,
and IBM separate email from other kinds of
documents.
An enormous range of file types word processing
documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, images and more are
managed efficiently within document management
systems, such as SharePoint. In these systems,
documents are tagged with increasingly sophisticated
metadata to help users find them.

Email preceded other

modern electronic
documents. As a result
it is perceived as a
different type of artifact
and is therefore handled
as a separate IT silo.

Emails have
different identifying
properties than other
documents.

Email was historically

seen as less official
than letters or
signed documents.

Email messages, by contrast, are stored

haphazardly within user email inboxes. Hard to
find, with no associated metadata and at risk
of permanent deletion for a variety of reasons (an
employee leaves the organization, email Inboxes
overflow, inadvertent archiving mistakes, etc.), emails
receive almost no consistent attention even though
they often contain incredibly important information.

When Email is
Handled Separately
The separation of email from other documents
has clear historical roots. However, there is no
fundamental reason emails should be stored and
managed separately. Furthermore, this insistence on
treating emails differently to other documents is in
fact counterproductive to the business:
It becomes hard to find emails, even
if they contain crucial information.
If the only proof of a transaction
or agreement is held in an email,
retrieving it for compliance or
regulatory purposes can become time
consuming, especially if the message
has been archived.

If a team is working on a project but

needs to check one piece of correspondence
held in an absent members inbox, they
cannot do their work.
Even the best company search engines
cannot draw in results from inboxes and
document repositories without extensive
and complicated customization. This makes
finding required information unnecessarily
time consuming.

Employees use email like

any other document
For too long, document
management environments
from the humble C: drive to the
most advanced cloud based
platforms - have forced users
to keep their emails and other
documents apart.
However, in their daily
working patterns employees
use email just like any other
document as illustrated in the
following examples.

The project
manager

Throughout any project,

product managers depend on
a variety of tools to complete
their tasks. Proposals may be
written in Microsoft Word,
Excel Spreadsheets are used to
plan project stages, and email
is used to manage tasks and
delegate responsibilities. While
documents are stored in a
common folder that all project
members can see, emails are
stored apart, only accessible
to the individuals who sent or
received them.

This situation presents

obstacles to smooth
collaboration. For example, it
is possible for a team member
to view project progress on
the spreadsheet because it is
stored in a shared folder. Or
it is possible to find specific
files by searching for specific
metadata attached to the
documents. These methods,
however, do not commonly
apply to email.

The compliance
manager
Organizations are more
aware than ever of the need
to responsibly store certain
types of information in a
structured and secure manner.
Whether the information
regards customer details,
legal documentation or
financial information, efficient
information management is
essential for compliance and
regulation.

Public sector organizations are

obliged to hold certain types of
data regarding their activities
and the citizens with whom
they come into contact.

Regulations such as the US

Freedom of Information
Act, the FOI Act in the UK or
Regulation no. 1049/2001 of
the European Commission
are important here.
In the Private sector,
similar legislation applies
in different industries,
from the Data Protection
Act to the Sarbanes-Oxley
Act (USA 2002), from the
Financial Services and
Markets Act (UK, 2000) to
professional requirements
such as Technical Actuarial
Standards, APS X2 Review
and in-house controls.

Legislation does not

distinguish between
emails and other types of
documents and still, emails
are most commonly stored
separately and far less
efficiently than other kinds
of documents.

Work orders when email

is the document
Businesses regularly send
actual invoices, proposals,
contracts and more, as the
body of email messages
especially once a close working
relationship has developed.
Smaller companies in particular
do away with official work
orders altogether.

However, when a business

needs to submit its accounts
and payment records they
will be stung by the fact
that their emails are always
kept separate from other
documents.

Once a business feels it can

trust a supplier, why go
through the extra hassle of
filling in work orders and
contracts at each stage?
Email is so much easier.

A new approach to
email and document
management is required
The traditional approach of separating
email and other documents is now
counterproductive and counterintuitive.
Whether it is for collaboration,
knowledge retention, compliance,
records management, audit or
discovery, organizations need to
manage emails the same way they
manage other documents.
Specifically, emails go through
drafts and versions, so they should
have assigned metadata and
be versioned just like any other
document, and they should be
stored and classified in the same
repository so they can be found
later on.

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Organizations struggling with the separation of email and documents have

developed various strategies for dealing with this omission:

Implement email and

document retention
policies and encourage
employees to follow them.

Train employees to
understand how to
manage different
document types, regularly
reminding them to save
important emails to the
companys Document
Management System.

Encourage employees
to download important
emails, convert them to
documents and manually
move them to the
appropriate document
repositories.

Perform monthly inbox clean

ups where unimportant
emails are permanently
deleted and staff transfer
essential emails to
permanent archives.

While the above methods do encourage better management of email

and documents, they are nonetheless limited. All these options are time
consuming; employees find them inconvenient and are likely to avoid
managing data correctly unless absolutely compelled to do so. They are
also manual and ad hoc so important emails may be missed.

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A better, alternative solution enables users to

drag and drop emails to the company's Document
Management System, while automatically assigning
metadata to email messages. In this case, emails
stored in the Document Management System should
be accessible on mobile devices as well.

harmon.ie helps companies address this email

management challenge without having to
change the systems they already use.
Our productivity tools enable you to manage
documents from SharePoint or OneDrive and
email services from Exchange in a unified
manner.

Dragging an email to SharePoint via

Todays information management challenges

call for a unified email and document
management approachharmon.ie delivers.

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