Email seems to be the best thing when you are an individual using free services like Gmail, Yahoo! mail, etc., but within an enterprise, an email system becomes a special type of challenge. Not only is communication to be synchronized internally as well as externally, but there are problems related to collaboration, filtering, and data management. With a little foresight and resourcefulness, enterprises can do a lot to increase email efficiency.
- Attachment size: Most organizations do not monitor the file attachment size, and before they know, the servers are choke-full of very large files that can’t be sent to other email domains. Entire projects and design layouts get attached and sent by email, which puts a lot of strain on server resources. Finally, business soon find movie clips and song files doing the rounds on internal email.
- Collaboration: Email as a communication medium is fine as long as there are two or three participants, but it is easy to quickly lose track of the communication when there are multiple parties involved. Detours and side-remarks tend to take the thread of conversation into entirely different directions, which are often fruitless. If you need to conduct collaborative conversations, better look at other alternatives such as video conferencing and have every conference documented.
- Versioning: When a project is being executed, it is possible for many people to be working on a single document. After a few passes over email, confusion begins to arise as to which is the latest version, which is not always the corrected one. The multiple versions also eat up disk space on the server. It is better to use some project management tools for this purpose.
Email is a sensitive medium of communication. It works fine only as long as it is not overloaded with tasks it was not meant for.
