* Archiving systems can help you find information more quickly
There are anywhere from one to four reasons that an organization should implement a messaging archiving system.
1. To comply with statutory requirements that require e-mail, instant messages and other documents to be preserved for minimum periods.
2. To make it easier to find information in the event that legal discovery requires it.
3. To improve the efficiency of messaging servers by reducing the amount of live storage present on them.
4. To make users more productive by allowing them to have access to old information.
I’d like to make the case that an e-mail archiving system can be justified simply on the last reason alone: making users more productive.
A study we conducted some time back found that 94% of e-mail users periodically refer to old e-mail when answering current e-mail, and that it takes a median of five minutes to find a message that is older than a couple of weeks. If we assume that a user searches for an old e-mail message once a week, that means that there are about 50 searches per year for a total of about four hours per year spent on this activity.
The time spent on searching is fairly inconsequential – people spend more time making small talk around the office every year than they spend on searching for old e-mail. However, the true productivity of an archiving system comes from the speed with which information can be found and from the ability to find information that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Two examples: if a client calls and asks about a project or an order, being able to find all relevant information in your mail store and that of others on a project team while you’re on the phone is extremely valuable. Likewise, being able to easily access all of the communications between the person whose job you now occupy and the clients on whom you have to get up to speed can also be extremely valuable.
In short, archiving makes individuals more productive simply by giving them access to old information. Given that many e-mail users send and receive in excess of 25,000 e-mails every year, the ability to find the needed bits of information in this growing quantity of data is invaluable.
