What if that e-mail became public knowledge?

There's nothing quite like seeing company secrets - or dirty laundry - plastered all over an Internet bulletin board to get otherwise somnolent corporate executives excited about spending money to tighten up e-mail security practices.

That's the dynamic Omniva Policy Systems is banking on this week as it releases Policy Manager Enterprise Edition and Wireless Gateway. These products are designed to prevent proprietary information from being spread hither and yon via e-mail - through carelessness or malicious intent - and to enforce document retention policies.

Omniva executives insist that their system will succeed where other e-mail security schemes have failed because they have made deployment and rules implementation easier for the network executive, and the exchange of e-mail for sender and recipient all but idiotproof. They also say that worries about wireless e-mail exacerbating security risks have generated intense interest in the gateway product.

Policy Manager lets administrators assign e-mail rights and restrictions universally across the organization and granularly, in that employees can be granted different sets of privileges. Designations for individual messages include "company confidential," which means the e-mail cannot be forwarded to the outside world, and "do not forward," which means it cannot be read by anyone not on the original recipient list.

The system also can make all copies of a message disappear after a preset time period, whether that's a certain number of years mandated by law for financial and human resources records, or days for run-of-the-mill e-mail that too many users pile far too high for no good reason. (The company used to be called Disappearing, Inc.)

The payoff comes not only through better compliance with retention regulations, but also in costs avoided should your organization be asked to comb through archived e-mail as part of a lawsuit . . . smaller archives mean less combing.

Omniva acknowledges that Policy Manager is not foolproof. For example, the system will not stop the determined mischief-maker from simply retyping a confidential corporate e-mail into a new file and forwarding it to his favorite trade-press columnist. Or, if we really want to get "cloak and dagger" about things, that scoundrel also could take a picture of the screen.

However, the company makes a compelling case that less-than-perfect protection beats the stuffing out of what most organizations have today, which amounts to little more than praying that people will do the right thing.

Of course, given the current economic malaise, even the combination of a pressing need and a nifty product can be no guarantee of success. CEO Kumar Sreekanti worked for Akamai before taking the helm at Omniva, which may explain his reply when asked if the lousy business climate might hurt his company:

"This is an easier sell than me walking in and saying I'll speed up your Web site."

Beaten to the punch

The boss comes charging into my office last week all excited to tell me he has "an idea that's going to make you famous."

"You mean more famous, right?"

"Yeah, more famous," he says, eyes rolling into the back of his head.

The idea: Launch a Web site where baseball fans can register their vows to foreswear the game for a year if the players go on strike Aug. 30 as threatened.

It was an excellent suggestion, which probably explains why a number of such sites already exist.

And even though there appears to be cause for optimism that sanity will prevail and a strike will be averted, we provide these links as a public service: www.mlbfanstrike.com, www.wethefans.com and www.baseballfansunite.org.

Or you could always just take a few swings here. The address is buzz@nww.com.

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