E-mail: the KM time-bomb
E-mail: the KM time-bomb
Most of the publicity scares surrounding email are concerned with viruses, but lost productivity and knowledge management issues are the focus of a new application from GMB Research.
Frank McKenna, MD of GMB, said groupware products such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange decreased productivity due to the need for employees to continually manage information on their PCs.
For a demonstration of the GEM-TC thin client, visit www.gmbdemosoft.com.
"They are invasive, they require the employee to do extra work, and they require extra code," he said. "We were doing that for years, then we said no, that's wrong. We make sure GEM is invisible to the user, and we capture the email in an inviolate state."
Mr McKenna said that if an email management program only captured correspondence at the client end, it was "too late" from a records management perspective as the user would have control over what was or was not stored.
"We sit at the mail server, and we make sure that any email which is a corporate record is stored, archived and can be retrieved later, automatically," said Mr McKenna."
Brendan Scott, Image & Data Manager's legal columnist, said that to support proper procedure for handling email, technological solutions were an "ounce of prevention" (see page 54).
"They can include, for example, such things as an appropriate and identifiable audit trail in relation to all electronic documents of the business which permit the identification of all accesses and modifications to the documents and to identify the persons responsible for those accesses," he said.
Other document management vendors are addressing this problem as well. For example, the latest version of the Fusion client for the PowerDOCS Desktop application from PC DOCS/Fulcrum includes a plug-in for the Outlook, Notes and Groupwise clients to save emails to its document management repository.
Rob Whiter, national sales manager for PC DOCS/Fulcrum Australia/New Zealand, said the Fusion client was all about "user-driven action", although this would mean some vital emails would slip through the cracks.
"That's inevitable - our experience is that information can go missing and it will," said Mr Whiter. "We can set up an agent to scour users' email boxes, and you can choose not to go into private email boxes if you wish. You can forward important documents to the Fulcrum repository or to someone like a knowledge manager or a librarian [for approval to be stored]."