ANTenna Blog -- Internet/Web

According to a new survey, almost two thirds of business users have to manage their own e-mail inboxes to stay under corporate capacity limits. And for almost a third, those limits are a paltry 100MB or less.

C2C sponsored the third-party survey to draw attention to its email data management solution called Archive One, but to me the interesting point is just how pathetic most business email systems are -- especially compared to business and even consumer email solutions available in the cloud, often for free.

I know, this isn't the first time I've written about how corporate IT departments are shackling users with second-rate solutions, but the evidence keeps pouring in.

Among these latest survey findings:

• 65 percent of survey respondents contend with mailbox quotas and are forced to self-manage their email to stay operational. (Heck, I do it all the time.)

• 66 percent take their own measures to save email messages in order to ensure they aren’t lost, with a majority storing email outside their company email system, in some cases even in personal/home email accounts. (I do that, too. Mostly by forwarding big stuff to my free gMail account, which I've been using for years and is still at only 11% of my quota.)

• 67 percent need to search for an email that is more than three months old at least once a month, with 28 percent spending time searching about once a week or even daily. (That's me too. And probably, you, too. I've got local archive which makes it easier, but of course that's not backed up and would be lost if something happened to my laptop...)

According to C2C,

The survey also found that those who self-manage email to stay within quotas frequently delete messages, delete attachments, and/or create a PST file – a method used in more than half of organizations surveyed. The over-reliance on PST files as a means to offload email creates several challenges when companies must meet legal requirements, since PST files do not have a uniform location and cannot be searched centrally for content with traditional technologies.

(At least I don't do THAT.)

There are lots of ways to deal with this, of course, but there's a real challenge for IT here. As corporate solutions fall further and further behind consumer solutions, workers will increasing turn to their own resources to do their jobs, taking them completely out of IT's abililty to track, support, or control.