Future of email

Came across an interesting forecast on email. “Email Statistics Report, 2009-2013” from the Radicati Group contains some interesting numbers:

The number of worldwide email users is projected to increase from over 1.4 billion in 2009 to almost 1.9 billion by 2013.

a 36% increase in users but

Worldwide email traffic will total 247 billion messages per day in 2009. By 2013, this figure will almost double to 507 billion messages per day.

So the amount of email you receive, on average is going to double in the next four years. What will that mean for your productivity? If you haven’t taken steps to limit the interruptions that emails can cause then you are going to get interrupted twice as much and only get half as much work done logic would seem to dictate.

The message is that if your emails are out of control now they are only going to get worse so it’s never too late to start looking at you system of email processing. The first is to configure your email program to prevent interruptions by turning off all alarms that activate when a new email arrives. From there you should spend time learning the feature of your email program like using message rules, categorizing and search. The more time you invest in learning your email program the better you can make it work for you. Too many people simply use their email program with its default configuration which may be fine for some IT programming guru somewhere but isn’t for ‘normal’ people.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that ‘you will’ get around to dealing with all those email in your inbox one day. Unless you decide to take control of your email then you are never going to get to the bottom of you inbox and the situation will only get worse as email volumes increase. For more information about working effectively with emails see www.doemailless.com.

Oops

Chalk up another win for the bad guys. If you read “Computer spies breach fighter jet project” you’ll find the following:

“In the case of the fighter-jet program, the intruders were able to copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems, officials say, potentially making it easier to defend against the craft.”

Yup, you read that right, 7TB of data. Roughly 7,000GB! Where from? The Pentagon no less. You have also gotta love this:

“The spies inserted technology that encrypts the data as it’s being stolen; as a result, investigators can’t tell exactly what data has been taken”

Talk about a “prefect crime”!

What is clear these days is that the latest developments in technology are not only being used for good but also bad. Like most tools, the Internet is neutral but it provides a platform that can be used in many different ways, which many people seem to overlook in their rush to get systems ‘online’.

As the standard law of computer security goes:

Q. How many vulnerabilities do you have to defend against?

A. EVERY SINGLE ONE

Q. How many vulnerabilities does someone need to find to exploit your system?

A. ONE

The odds are certainly not in your favour. That’s why you have to keep working so hard to keep the bad guys out but with odds like that do we ever really stand a chance? It certainly doesn’t seem so does it?

BPOS links

Here are some handy Microsoft Business Productivity Online Service (BPOS) links that I have found and reviewed lately:

– Microsoft Online Services FAQs: covers some of the most technical questions asked about BPOS.

– Migrate to Microsoft Online Services: This document describes how to migrate your on-premise Exchange Server mailboxes and POP3 and IMAP4 mailboxes to Exchange Online.

– About Using Your Domain with Microsoft Online Services: If your company has registered an Internet domain name, you can add that domain to Microsoft Online Services.

– Microsoft Online Services Trial Guide: Step-by-step instructions for setting up and using a trial account for the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite from Microsoft Online Services.

– Microsoft Online Services Team Blog

There is plenty of information out there and in some cases probably too much. As I work through what I find I’ll post up what I think has the most value.

Complaint handling

Every business get complaints, whether they be from customers, suppliers or employees. The question is what processes do you have in place to deal with these? Are they handled in an ad hoc or a structured way? Are they reviewed on a regular basis to ensure that there are no fundamental flaws in business processes? How are the resolutions communicated to those who raised the complaint as well as others?

I would suggest that there aren’t many businesses that have a complaint handling system in place. We have all experienced making a complaint and then failing to have that complaint addressed or resolved to our satisfaction. However, if you have ever dealt with a business that did have an effective complaint system then you can probably appreciate how it may have actually increased your loyalty to that business. Why? Because you were treated with respect. Your concern was taken seriously, acted upon and you received timely communication as to its resolution. Unfortunately, these types of experiences seem to be few and far between these days.

Think about what processes you currently have in place to handle the whole complaint process. How easy is it for the complaint to be recorded in the first place? What steps are in place for it to be routed to the correct person? How can its progress be communicated to all parties, especially the person who made the complaint? How are the resolutions to complaints documented and made available for later reference? After any complaint how can your systems be reviewed to prevent any reoccurrence?

The cost of obtaining new customers is far high than retaining existing ones. Complaint handling should not be seen as a burden but as a chance to not only build customer loyalty but improve you internal systems. In many cases you can’t see the issues with your products and services because you are too close. That being so, your customers are in the best place to provide you with feedback (good and bad) as to how well these systems are delivering on their promises. Before you go and consider adding to these systems take a look at how you handle problems that may arise with them.

Killer app

I’ve been doing some more playing with Microsoft Business Productivity Online Services (good old BPOS for short) and I reckon I know what is going to be the killer app for the small to medium business. Firstly, let me cover a few other nice things I’ve discovered about BPOS recently.

The first is the Single Sign On (SSO) tool that comes with BPOS. Basically, you install it on your workstation, log into it once and it logs you into all your BPOS applications. Not only that it will configure the local applications for your use automatically. Things like Outlook get configured to allow seamless access to Exchange in the cloud. That is nice and it is going to make it real easy for users on their desktops but that isn’t the killer app.

Next there is SharePoint. There are some limitations around exactly what can be done with BPOS SharePoint but it is more than most customers require anyway. I tested out the ability to index PDF documents, for example, and that works fine, which is great since they are not normally indexed by default (see www.wssops.com for more info). SharePoint in the cloud is going to be huge boon for users since it is going to give them so much more functionality that what they currently have with traditional file shares. Yet that is still not the killer app in my books.

The real killer app for the small to medium business is going to be Web Conferencing (aka Live Meeting). As part of the BPOS package they are going to be able to conduct meetings, conferences, presentations all via the web. This is not only going to save them time and money, it is going to make them appear more professional as well as greener (i.e. less travel). Once you appreciate that you can do so much more business with web conferencing you being to understand that even though the other BPOS stuff is great (and it is), Web conferencing I believe is going to tip most people in its favour.

I can just hear it now – “Wow, you get all that – email, collaboration (SharePoint) AND web conferencing for a low monthly fee? Where do I sign?”

Microsoft BPOS

What does BPOS stand for? Business Productivity Online Services or in more simple terms Microsoft’s cloud based application offerings. I’ve been keen to get my hands on this for myself and had the chance this week during some classroom training.

If you are new to what Microsoft is planning to offer then start with:

http://www.microsoft.com/online

If you are a Microsoft Partner then I’d suggest you take a look at:

http://www.discoveronlineservices.com

There you’ll get a better idea of how much Microsoft is going to invest in cloud based services.

To get a better idea of what these services actually look like have a look at the following video presentation:

http://www.microsoft.com/online/demo/v2/demo.aspx

The training was very interesting in that it gave you direct hands on with the product as the following screen shots show:

The Home page includes overview of the services available, tasks and actions.

User management screen displays what products user have as well as actions that can be performed on these users.

Service settings page – showing the applications (Exchange and SharePoint in this case) and how resources are devoted to each. Along the top you’ll see Live Meeting and Office Communications Online are another 2 applications.

If you now click on the SharePoint Online from the menu you’ll see the information about the SharePoint application. You can easily create a new site (via the New button) or administer the existing site via the Site settings button.

Here’s the Migration tab that allows you to configure synchronization with an existing Windows network.

Now BPOS will have its challenges, some of these being unique to Australia, but in general I believe this is the way things are going. Sure it may seen immature now but it is only going to improve.

I’ll spend some time in some upcoming blogs going into a bit more detail of what I’ve found but if you are at all interested in online services from Microsoft I’d suggest that you starting looking at it now!

SharePoint TIFF indexing

One of the greatest features of SharePoint and Search Server Express is their ability to provide full text searching for a range of documents. They achieve this via something known as an iFilter. Out of the box both SharePoint and Search Server will do most Microsoft Office documents and common file formats (i.e. .txt, .html, etc). With the addition of some custom iFilters and some configuration you can also get them to index Adobe PDF’s, Zip files and so on. For information on configuring these additional document types see www.wssops.com.

It now seems that Microsoft has made available an iFilter for TIFF files via this download:

Windows TIFF IFilter Installation and Operations Guide

It would appear however that the TIFF iFilter is part of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 rather than a separate download. None the less I think this represents some very powerful new functionality for SharePoint.

How is that? Consider all the network copier/faxes that are now in businesses. Wouldn’t be nice if you could automatically have a document scanned and delivered to a SharePoint document library? Well that is already possible, but what if now all those scanned TIFF documents could also be fully searchable without any further interaction? It certainly seems that provides you are running SharePoint on Windows Server 2008 R2 and the TIFF iFilter is enabled.

Imagine that, you could scan in a whole swag of you existing paper documents, have them sent directly to SharePoint where they could be saved and indexed. Also imagine if you could have all your faxes sent to a SharePoint library where again, they could be saved and indexed. The more I think about this the more powerful it becomes I reckon. Don’t forget that SBS 2008 has inbuilt faxing reception to document libraries. So if SBS 2008 R2 ever becomes available then the integration of this TIFF iFilter is going to be a huge boon I reckon.

So what do you need to make this happen? Windows Server 2008 R2 with SharePoint installed. Excuse me while I go off to do some testing.