Making sense of e-mail management

By Our Corporate Reporter

CHENNAI, SEPT. 16. Communication is an essential part of life. For business there is a need to communicate with shareholders, employees, vendors, customers and government agencies. Communication can be visual, verbal or written. The written form of communication is the most effective because it can transcend time. Until the advent of the Internet, paper had been the predominant medium of written communication.

The internet is just another means of communication and e-mail is the most widely used application on the Internet. Roughly 70 per cent of all internet usage is e-mail, according to Mr. Karthik Iyer, CEO of enmail.com, the Chennai based total e-mail solution provider.

At the Connect 2001 seminar here he observed that e-mail management might not make much of a difference for an individual. But for an organisation it just might make the difference between being in business versus being out of business. Managing e-mail is tantamount to knowledge management.

The best way is to oursource e-mail management. If you use electricity you do not buy a power plant or if you need telephone service you do not buy satellites. An application service provider (ASP) provides the application on a rent instead of a buy model. The economy of scale allows the ASP to provide the services at a much lower cost to the organisation than if it were done in-house. E-mail is the application that defined the ASP business model. While using e-mail is quite simple, managing it is an entirely different ballgame. Sourcing valuable information from hackers, maintaining privacy, ensuring availability are not just buzzwords; they are real issues and need to be dealt with professionally, according to Mr. Karthik Iyer.

enmail has already introduced a software `enmail Xchange' which would bridge the gap between an organisation's internal and external messaging communication systems. According to the CEO, this indigenous mail management software would reduce communication cost for a firm by connecting to the internet periodically and downloading all incoming messages and uploading all outgoing messages using a single connection.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Business
Previous : Selling pressure on Lyons Range
Next     : Singapore to host Baucon Asia 2001