State of the Internet

Nice reality check.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Gauging the Real Value of SaaS E-mail

I'm pleased to announce the publication of "Gauging the Real Value of Software as a Service (SaaS) E-mail for Small and Medium Businesses," a Collaborative Strategy Guild white paper on SaaS E-mail and productivity. You can download the paper via the CSG site. Here's the abstract:

The e-mail market is rapidly evolving as new business-grade software as a service (SaaS) e-mail options become a viable alternative to the traditional on-site e-mail by competing on price and value. Information Technology (IT) decision makers are pressured to reduce costs, so they’re considering a move to SaaS e-mail solutions, which is driving businesses to scrutinize current e-mail strategies. Making a SaaS e-mail decision depends upon the unique needs of the business and how available options not only offer cost savings, but also productivity value.

In this paper, Collaborative Strategy Guild founding member, Karen Hobert, focuses on the SaaS e-mail market, its impact on small and medium businesses (SMBs), and how to find the real value in different product offerings.

Spam Works

Wondering why you get so much spam? Because it works. A recent Register article reports the following from a Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) survey on email usage and spam:

Almost a third of consumers admit responding to messages that might be spam emails. Some acted out of curiosity or by mistake but a puzzling 96 from a sample of 800 (12 per cent) said they clicked because they interested in the product or service advertised in junk mail messages.

Filtering helps, a lot, but accordingly people would rather slog through the spam than prevent it:

While half of those surveyed said they never click on suspected spam, around one in five (21 per cent) fail to use email filtering software or services.

For more interesting facts on email usage and spam see the MAAWG study, "A Look at Consumers' Awareness of Email Security and Practices, " Part I and Part II. 

 

Google Beachhead

Google continues to bolster its beachhead on the enterprise email market. Today it announced it is providing free of charge to Google Apps Premier and Education customers a "plug-in" that will migrate Notes mail and personal directory information to Google Apps.

The new tool lets customers migrate mail, calendar and contacts from Notes to Google Apps. The syncing tool, which Google says is a native Notes application, can be installed and configured in less than 30 minutes, for multiple users at once. The tool has already been tested with 40 of Google’s enterprise clients, including JohnsonDiversey (10K users) and Valeo (32K users). The tool is free for Google Apps Premier and Edu customers. 

The aggressive ramp up to enterprise-grade solutions hasn't always been as successful as Google has hoped. Changing the mind-set of enterprise IT decision makers who tend to follow established software delivery methods and practices is still a hard practice. In recent weeks Google has capitulated to some of these customer attitudes such as removing the "beta" label from the Google Apps tools.  The more clumsy release of the Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook connector has been met with criticism for not offering pair-wise functionality with Outlook and disabling Microsoft Desktop Search, the search mechanism for Outlook. A July 10, 2009 PC World (IDG News Service) article puts it this way:

So Google embarked -- probably grudgingly -- down the path that other e-mail vendors have traveled with little success: trying to replicate the Outlook-Exchange experience with their back-end e-mail server and Outlook. Here was Google apparently getting dragged into the Microsoft way of doing things, creating -- gasp! -- a piece of PC software: an Outlook plug-in. The problems and complaints started immediately.

Right away, industry analysts cautioned CIOs and IT managers to examine the Google tool closely, warning them that it couldn't fully replicate in Gmail the functionality of the Outlook-Exchange combination, lacking basic features like the ability to synchronize Outlook notes and tasks, for example.

A tough market indeed. Clearly Google wants it enough to put so much effort into lowering the barriers to enterprise interest. In its campaign to grease the migration skids and polish the consumer-come-enterprise perception Google is waging a fierce battle that will require formidable reinforcements to back up.

Sizing up the Exchange 2010 Integrated Archives

A couple weeks ago I posted information on Microsoft's Exchange 2010 beta announcement. Since this is Microsoft's first foray into email archiving as a product, let alone an integrated feature of Exchange, I was curious about the implementation and what customers could expect. I've now got some more answers and it looks like the new service falls somewhere between a local personal archive and an centralized email archival and records management system.

Bottom line, the Exchange 2010 integrated archiving is a feature of the mailbox server role and builds email archives on the same server as the live mailbox. The archive is stored in centrally managed Exchange message store that allows administrative access to archived message content and ediscovery capabilities. The end user experience in the mailbox is a separate folder for the archived messages. The archive does not support SIS or stubbing, and there is no tiered storage management or records management for archive disposition other than the global mailbox purge, retention and hold features introduced in Exchange 2007. As far as existing local personal archive PSTs, users can drag and drop existing archives to the server based store from their desktops (probably requires Outlook).

So far Microsoft is looking at the beta program to gain more insight on how this new feature will impact server performance and number of mailboxes the server can support. Exchange 2007 brought economies of scale by increasing the number of mailboxes supported by a single server and I'm curious how the increased archiving might impact that performance. I suppose this is more of a storage issue than a messaging service issue; storage will likely need to be increased on mailbox servers to support the archives.

One of the questions I have is how disruptive the integrated archiving will be on the current email archiving market and whether it will put partners out of business. In general, if customers need more robust archiving and records management the Exchange 2010 archiving will not be sufficient, but for remedying problems associated with personal archives and errant PST files the solution will likely be popular. At this point, customers that require heavy lifting with storage and records management they will continue to look to third parties that offer more control over the archives.