How does your company manage messaging problems?

We recently received the following from a Lead IT Systems Analyst at a Fortune 500 company in response to some research we were doing on the topic of supporting messaging systems. It’s a good example of how a major company manages messaging-related problems. This is what he says:

“Within our organization, the messaging team, network team, and Active Directory (AD) team are all separate. Within those teams, subgroups of people work on specific issues. For example, within the messaging team, you have a group that deals with Exchange, a group that deals with BlackBerry, a group that deals with perimeter security, and so on.

“Typically, when someone calls in to the corporate help desk [and] they mention Outlook or e-mail, the messaging team receives the ticket. At this point, we actually have a team within the corporate help desk that deals with nothing but messaging-related issues (general e-mail, BlackBerry, desktop faxing, etc).  Whatever they can’t answer is sent to the group on our team that deals with that particular problem.

“If we look at it, and determine that it is an issue with AD, we get a hold of the AD folks and get them involved. Likewise, if it seems to be a network-related problem, such as DNS, we get a hold of the group within the network team that deals with that particular problem. The messaging team ‘owns’ the issue even if the problem is DNS. Since our service is the most used ‘application’ in the organization, it is there where users seem to discover problems. Since they discovered the problem in Outlook, even if they’re getting a non-delivery report (NDR) for an Internet company, the issue is ours to resolve.”

This points out just how critical and pervasive messaging has become. Even problems that are totally unrelated to messaging, such as the NDR for a Web site, have to get solved by the messaging team in many organizations. This is primarily because many users employ messaging as their focal point for communications, applications and other services. So if a problem occurs in anything even remotely related to messaging, it can get dumped in the lap of the messaging team to solve.

I’d like to get your thoughts on this to see if it resonates with your experience – please drop me a line.

Many thanks to the individual who provided the input for this article.