At the beginning of the 1990s, managing e-mailboxes wasn't much different than managing traditional mailboxes. It was just another administrative duty delegated to secretaries and office assistants.
"Having come out of a convenient little executive toy in the last decade to an infrastructure-critical application is [e-mail's] biggest accomplishment of the last decade," said Michele Rubenstein, president of the EMA, formerly the Electronic Messaging Association and now a forum within Menlo Park, Calif.-based The Open Group.
"When you're looking at companies that have tens of thousands of users, you can literally stop business if e-mail goes down," Rubenstein said.
"The number of users has proliferated from hundreds [in one company] to hundreds of thousands when you think about customers and suppliers," said Jack Cooper, CIO of Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. in New York.
"Reliability of the systems is always a challenge because it's something that people are always looking at," said Ryan Mitchell, a former e-mail administrator at Hewitt Associates LLC in Lincolnshire, Ill.
Early business use of e-mail was strictly inside the corporation. E-mail software wasn't built to exchange messages between systems. For administrators, it kept things simple. Then came standards. Standards allowed everyone to send e-mail to anyone, since we all use the same protocol to transfer e-mail, Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. In addition to the security implications, administrators must now contend with the massive volume of messages that need to be stored, Mitchell said.
"The amount of storage, and the security and the metadirectory that keep the directory accurate becomes an important task," Cooper said. "You have to carefully monitor and access the e-mail storage. If not, it can become a huge hog of resources."
Some companies, like Chicago-based The Boeing Co., put strict limits on their users' mailboxes. Others simply warn a user when his mailbox has gobbled up too much disk space. But volume also brings another problem.
Companies need to get client and partner lists integrated into their directories, said Dana Gardner, an analyst at Aberdeen Group Inc. in Boston.
E-mail administrators must set up each user account, an encryption key associated with that account and the user's access rights. Some also manage what kind of information gets outside the firewall. Scanning software can do this, but the task has as much to do with establishing policies as with technology, and that creates more work for the administrator.
It's almost impossible to keep track of what comes in, and, just as important, what goes out. A digital rights management system, software that protects intellectual property from flying out onto the Internet, is one solution, but it requires role management.
"The issue of role management is, in my opinion, tied in with the whole concept of identity management," Rubenstein said. "That ID can be an entity like a router or a person, or it could be a group. How do you manage it? I don't always know [my partners]. I haven't done business with them for 20 years, I may only do business with them once in a lifetime."
The fact that you can get at mail in many ways from many places "distributes intellectual property to places you'll never be able to manage it," said Mitchell. "We're trying really hard to set policy, but policy only goes so far."
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