Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Hi

Take a look at NearPoint from Mimosa Systems. [URL deleted by staff. Please read our forum's Important Guidelines and use your Profile page to share this information.]

If I can help any further please do not hesitate to contact me.

Joanna

Hi Zahid,

exchange@PAM is a good program and it can handle the size you are referring to. It archives emails so you can look for them later with text search in the body of the email and the attachments. It's e-discovery compliant so that no emails are lost if you need them for any legal reasons. And best of all, the end user isn't disturbed at all by exchange@PAM.

Check it out at
https://www.hs-soft.com/products/email-archiving/en/feature-archiving.aspx

Dear Zahid

Thanks for the clarification. Before I weigh in with too much details, the numbers of emails your client wishes to store and if necessary act on are a little baffling.

500,000 emails a day generated by 5000 users implies and average email output of 100 emails per user. Unless they are using automated procedures and templates to a range of standard email formats, the average user would be hard pressed to write 100 emails a day and even if they could, it would leave them no time to act on them or carry out other duties associated with their job.

If the emails sent are from a range of standard templates, there is little need to save every email generated in full. For example, when sending out 100 notifications to 100 clients from a fixed template, storage need only involve a reference to the template used and a list of the recipients.

Also the figures are stargborgling! They imply that in a year of 220 working days, the system will be expected to store 120,000,000 emails a year or 1.2Billion over the ten years required.

A separate server for such an application would be a given.

From your bullet points:

Monitored – how, by whom and what for. If categorised they can be looked at by the person to whom they belong, the sender or by other information which can be added to the store (sectoring)

In-boxes – with these volumes: Inboxes and their accessibility hardly come into the equation. Outlook and Exchange would fall over if you stored that lot, so monitoring would need to be done via a query of the repository which does not suffer from problems of scale. What are they monitoring – it is beyond the ability of a manager to read them all and probably beyond the ability of a user to do so. Is monitoring needed in order to report on the inflow / outflow or is it intended that the managers and users monitor them as and when needed? Stats, reporting and analysis are perfectly possible. Expecting someone to read the stored input and output is not.

Audit trailes require that the email is stored against a client record. The trail shows the emails, replies and executive decisions taken based on the information I the email along with phone notes and other correspondence.

Real time search is possible if it is from and indexed system. The challenge is usually to ensure that the outgoing and incoming emails are structured such that they automatically add key field of your client’s choice to the database. Tagging them by hand is hugely time consuming, and I guess that these guys have real job functions to attend to without becoming glorified data-input clerks.

Queuing is a separate issue to storage, retrieval and analysis. That is one of the easier aspects of your requirements.

This system would have to be independent of the client’s existing servers, but are there requirement to integrate the stored information with another system, such as CRM or ERP? If you link this to Outlook or Exchange Server, any complex search will shut down the company’s email service for the duration of the search.

Archiving can be provided by a fairly large number of packages, but you will need one where the archive is itself indexed in order to retrieve relevant emails.

Security is again relatively trivial – as long as the email is tagged and categorised on receipt you can restrict who can either see it or use it.

Exporting an archived email or a number of emails to another format is relatively straight forward, but what format or what formats is required. More importantly, what are they going to do with up to 1.2 Billion emails (In ten years time) The volume is too high for anyone (Superman included) for them to be read in bulk but automated systems processing can do the job. If the need is for analysis, then you only need to run reports on the archive and then to deliver them to the user.

Mimosa may be able to handle the volume, it is a good system, but without extensive configuration it will not give you that which your client seeks.

All in all, it is worth your while to ask the question, “What do you wish to do with the stored data and the archived date. Do you want to spend a year reading things of do you want to know where the business is going through reporting”? Obviously this does not apply to emails which are retrieved to resolve a given issue of to use as evidence in legal action

Hope these questions help

Steve Alker
Xspirt