DYS Analytics this week issued a press release in which it discussed the benefits that its Email Control product provided to the University Health System as it migrated to Microsoft Exchange 2003. UHS provides e-mail services for more than 4,000 users at the University of Tennessee medical center and the university's Graduate School of Medicine, among others.

The use of DYS' offering allowed UHS to save substantial amounts of time and effort as it migrated to Exchange 2003. Among the benefits were an 80% reduction in the amount of stored content that would have had to be migrated, plus a 25% reduction in the number of mailboxes that would have had to be moved. In total, UHS saved more than 130 person-hours of IT staff time during the migration.

This article is not intended to be an advertisement for DYS, but instead is meant to point out the relatively simple things that organizations can do to make their Exchange and other environments run more smoothly and less expensively. For example, some organizations run an e-mail monitoring tool to determine the largest senders of e-mail each week in terms of how many gigabytes they send via e-mail. Doing so can reveal the marketing administrator who is sending 15,000 2MB PDF files each week containing the company newsletter. Monitoring this type of activity would allow IT to help this person to modify their practices so that perhaps they send out 15,000 e-mails with a link to the newsletter instead. One company that monitored the five biggest users of e-mail each week, and followed this up with some education for these users, ended up saving more than a terabyte of storage space in a relatively short period of time.

I'd like to hear about your best practices for helping users to employ e-mail more effectively. Please send me a note.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.