What is Email Management?

Email is now the de facto standard for business communication across organizations at this time. Recent research shows the extensive use of emails in business and its projected growth in the future presents major information management challenges and risks for many organizations. Just as any type of business information and record, email must be included as part of, and adhered to the organizational standards addressing information and records:

• Capture
• Classification
• Storage
• Preservation
• Management
• Destruction

The vast quantities of emails held in inboxes, sent folders, and deleted item folders put the organization at risk and adversely impact the performance of email servers in the organizations. Email servers were never designed to act as repositories for such great quantities of emails and move control of this information away from the organization. Without the management of emails, it is difficult for organizations to meet their legal preservation requirements in the event of litigation and government investigations, increasing the effort and cost in responding to e-discovery and disclosure.

Email management systems centrally capture emails created and received by employees. Using a classification scheme to manage this content, retention periods and access controls can be applied to manage emails. Metadata associated with the emails can be captured to allow this information to be managed and retrieved. Email active archiving is one of the most common applications for email management. At their most basic, these solutions either copy or remove messages from the messaging application and some it at another location. Some approaches copy all messages coming into and out of the messaging application in real time, while others will physically remove the messages from the message store. In some of these solutions, the messages are not archived, but attachments are and are replaced with either a stub or an outright link within the message.

These email management systems, while attractive and effective, are merely part of an overall solution. Organizations need to have records management programs, consisting of organization-wide policies and procedures, staff and activities, in which these computer applications can be successfully utilized.

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AIIM provides an educational roadmap for the industry.

• Certificate Training Programs - Industry leading Certificate Training Programs include Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Electronic Records Management (ERM), Business Process Management (BPM), Information Organization & Access (IOA/Search), and SharePoint. Courses are available via the web or classroom.
• AIIM Essentials Courses - The AIIM Essentials programs are short online courses that are focused on very specific topics applicable to any organization, and are a perfect complement to the AIIM Certificate offerings. Courses include: Imaging and Recognition, MoReq2, Social Media, and PDF/A.
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