http://www.ferris.com Analysts specializing in messaging & collaboration Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There is a new phenomenon happening behind closed doors in the corporate world. We call it email bankruptcy. To illustrate, we would challenge you to an experiment. Assuming your email policies allow this, we dare you to simply delete all the email in your inbox that is older than three days ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/24/email-overload-declaring-email-bankruptcy/ There's an argument that says: Keeping information in the right folders is too much work. Plus, you always want to look at the same information in other ways, and having it kept in folders makes it harder to find. So don't bother foldering. Instead, expect to use a search engine. ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/24/foldering-vs-search/ EEMA was founded in 1987 as the European Electronic Messaging Association, mirroring the now-defunct EMA. EEMA has continued with a loyal group of supporters and shifted focus with industry trends. Its focus is now Electronic Identity, and we just attended the two-day European e-Identity Conference in The Hague. EEMA is outsourcing ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/23/eema-has-found-a-new-role/ Today, courts sometimes ask parties to a suit to justify the relevance and accuracy of their search algorithms. That's a problem:     You can't explain the algorithm, because the search vendor doesn't reveal its proprietary secrets.     Even if the vendor were to explain its algorithms, chances are a cocktail of approaches are used ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/22/courts-will-tolerate-search-inaccuracies/ I feel like I'm in the popular movie starring Bill Murray. I've just spent my first week in Japan working with my Japanese business partners. One of the enjoyable parts of the trip has been observing Japanese customs. In particular, I have found their use of cell phones to be quite ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/21/lost-in-translation-cell-phone-use-in-japan/ McAfee has a successful virus control business, over $1B/year in revenues. The firm has made various investments in other types of content control over the last five years. Now it's placing major emphasis on its efforts. Summarizing the technology:     Provides:          Virus and malware control.          Spam control.          Phishing and spyware ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/20/mcafee-update/ Marshal Software released its Secure Email Server. In summary:      Sits at the Internet boundary.      Opens incoming encrypted email, checks that it conforms to policy, and sends on to the user (if necessary re-encrypting).      Encrypts outgoing email based on policy, and sends on to recipient.      Uses public key cryptography.      Works with ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/17/mailmarshal-secure-email-server/ LiveOffice specializes in messaging compliance solutions for financial services. The company has had success in this niche, and is now moving to provide services to the world outside of financial services. It recently launched LiveOffice Mail Archive, a hosted email archiving offering. In summary:     Provides archiving, e-discovery, and compliance services.     Aimed at small ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/17/hosted-archiving-service-from-liveoffice/ Today, it's IT's job to define information leakage policy within an organization. This isn't right. IT can't do a good job with this alone. Teamwork is needed among IT and user departments in order to determine what the policies should be. This is easier said than done. Many user departments are evasive, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/16/dlp-lob-users-must-help-it-in-policy-definition/ Over the coming weeks we will be blogging a series on email and information overload. As part of this series, we will be running some quizzes, and also posting some challenges. We are very interested in hearing from you on the following questions. Send your responses to david.sengupta@ferris.com (if you wish ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/16/email-overload-are-you-affected/ Many people want to use the BlackBerry as their mobile device. This presents a problem for hosted Exchange vendors. Say they charge $15/month for support. RIM charges the service provider $3-$5/month for the use of a BES Server. This means the end user gets charged around an extra $10/month for mobile ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/15/blackberry-support-expensive-for-hosted-exchange/ In 2006, U.S. consumers received about 800 million text messages that they identified as "spam." In 2007, we estimated the total was around 1.1 billion. Our estimate for 2008 is 1.5 billion. At first sight, these numbers sound large, but remember that this is over an entire year and that there ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/14/sms-text-message-spam-is-a-minor-problem/ Anybody can put together simple data leak prevention policies, like filtering out any 10-digit phone numbers, or anything with a set of sensitivity words like "Confidential." However, many policies turn out to need a lot of thought in order to define them, so that:      You catch most of the stuff you ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/14/dlp-users-need-help-with-policy-definition/ Cemaphore has been extending its continuity solutions to Google. In so doing, it has developed a way you can replace Exchange servers by Gmail. MailShadow for GoogleApps lets you use Outlook as a front end to Gmail. As the software develops, Cemaphore plans to provide a very high level of compatibility ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/13/cemaphores-outlook-front-end-to-google/ When a data leak prevention product tells you you're contravening policy, chances are you get a message like: "Policy violation: You're trying to send sensitive material to someone who shouldn't receive it." This may be alright for simple policies. But, in general, users need more specific information about what's gone wrong, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/10/dlp-user-notices-too-crude/ Are you feeling saturated with all the tools that are supposed to make life better (email, cell phone, IM, etc.)? Do you feel as if your work performance is lagging as a result? If so, then I recommend you take a look at this thought-provoking book by Maggie Jackson, "Distracted: ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/09/are-you-feeling-distracted/ RPost has an interesting e-contracting service:      Getting contracts signed is a big pain. You email documents, the recipients have to print them, maybe they don't have a printer handy, then they sign the document, post it back, or they scan it and email it back, and things get lost sometimes, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/08/rpost-speeds-contract-fulfillment/ When companies do competitive bake-offs, they generally apply simple tests. For example, they look for credit card numbers, a customer account number, or keywords. These tests are not a good indication of how well a product will do in practice, because many policies will end up having to be far more ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/07/testing-dlp-policies-in-competitive-bake-offs/ Updated July 8: the price changed slightly between when we were briefed and the announcement.  On July 7 8, Microsoft formally announced its new Online hosted services. These are "in the cloud", or software-as-a-service (SaaS) implementations of Exchange and SharePoint (not to be confused with Exchange Hosted Services, which is the ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/06/microsoft-online-hosted-services-too-expensive/ On July 7 8, Microsoft formally announced its new Online hosted services. These are "in the cloud", or software-as-a-service (SaaS) implementations of Exchange and SharePoint (not to be confused with Exchange Hosted Services, which is the hosted email security service formerly from Frontbridge). Microsoft first announced this more than a year ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/06/finally-microsoft-online-hosted-services/