O fato é que tal disposição permite uma série infinita de interrupções, das previstas às intrusivas que se impõem sobre suas prioridades independentemente de sua vontade. Em especial, as interrupções causadas pela busca incessante e avisos da chegada de novos emails em seu inbox, estão sendo apontadas como muito mais nociva do que imaginávamos, conforme artigo recente do American Journal of Psychiatry que identifica o habito excessivo de se comunicar, surfar e entreter-se na internet como uma doença mental que tem sintomas que afetam as relações humanas. De certa maneira, nos sentimos como no experimento de Pavlov, estimulados com avisos sonoros e visuais que nos despertam a curiosidade sugerindo a existência de algo potencialmente importante a um clique de distância.

Se você apesar de já estar acostumado com isto, quiser dar um basta nesta avalanche de interrupções. Sugerimos que você de um espaçamento maior entre os intervalos de recepção e envio de emails e consequentemente reduza o ritmo de chegada de emails ao seu computador, na forma abaixo:

No Outlook 2007.

1.   1. Clique em “Ferramentas”

2. Clique em “Opções”;

3. Selecione “configurar email”;

4  4.Clique em “Enviar/receber...”

5. 5.Caso não esteja selecionado ainda, clique no box de “agendar envio/recebimento automático a cada”. Preencha a caixa com um intervalo entre 30, 45, ou 60 minutos.

Assim, você controla o fluxo de entrada e saída dos seus emails ao contrário de responder a ele. Anula a grande incongruência da enxurrada de informações e passa a gerir suas atividades da forma mais conveniente e produtiva a seu alcance.

Finalmente, especialistas divergem em diversas pontos, mas são unânimes em uma única recomendação:

“Não lidem com emails nas suas horas mais produtivas, tão pouco quando estiverem focados nas prioridades de seu dia, mas sim nos intervalos de suas atividades principais, por um tempo determinado, entre 10 e 30 minutos, e dedicado exclusivamente a isto.”

Espero que todos tenham uma boa semana e fiquem a vontade para fazer seus comentários e solicitações de assuntos que lhes interesse.

Até breve.

Infocoach

infocoach@infocoach.org

Se você for como a imensa maioria dos usuários, provavelmente não gasta muito tempo pensando a respeito de como nomear seus arquivos quando os salva. Inclusive, se me permite um palpite, o faz quase automaticamente, numa fração de segundos. Naquele instante, com uma agenda cheia, a tarefa adiante é concluir o conteúdo do documento, enviá-la e aguardar a resposta, e assim o faz. Porém, infelizmente as coisas não são assim tão simples, e quando você menos espera, precisa daquele documento para incluir uma ou duas palavras que farão toda a diferença, ou pior ainda, seu chefe, está na sua frente e, adoraria redigir contigo uns pedaços do documento que julga extremamente relevantes.

Aí, começa aquela mini maratona em busca do arquivo, entra em Meus Documentos Recentes e não está lá, rapidamente abre a pasta Meus Documentos, olha, olha novamente e também não parece ser nenhum deles, abre um arquivo, abre outro. Desapareceu. Quando, finalmente, decide pesquisar e lembra: Qual era mesmo o nome do arquivo? Em que dia escrevi mesmo aquilo? E daí por diante,...

Problema freqüente, mas altamente evitável através da adoção de 4 truquezinhos básicos na nomeação de arquivos:

1. Sempre inclua o nome do destinatário no nome do arquivo.

Parece óbvio, mas você ficaria surpreso como a grande maioria não faz isto. A correspondência para um fornecedor não é a mesma que a de outro fornecedor, e isto já é um fator de diferenciação expressivo.

2. Sempre inclua a data do evento ou da confecção do documento.

A data, segundo muitos analistas, é o elemento mais significativo na identificação de um arquivo. Exageros a parte, sem dúvida alguma, juntamente com o nome do destinatário, exclui uma enormidade de opções nas pesquisas por arquivos.

3. Sempre inclua qual a natureza do documento.

Por natureza entendemos: convites, proposta, notas de reuniões, solicitação de informações, entre outras. Novamente, parece óbvio e certamente por esta razão deva estar sempre presente no nome de qualquer arquivo. Na pesquisa por um arquivo sobre “renovação de cadastro” ter a natureza no nome do arquivo excluirá automaticamente documentos de outras naturezas.

4. Decida por uma forma de disposição dos elementos do nome do arquivo e fique com ela.

Apesar de não ser um diferencial para reconhecimento, isto define a organização de seus arquivos nas pastas e também na ordem que aparecerão quando feita uma pesquisa. Como por exemplo:

Armazém_100908_proposta.doc;

proposta_Armazém_100908.doc ; ou

100908_proposta_ Armazém.doc.

Uma vez incorporado o hábito de nomear seus arquivos com o objetivo de torná-los facilmente recuperáveis, logo encontrará exatamente aquilo que funciona bem para você.

Boa semana, e caso deseje mais informações sobre o assunto, ou tenha outro tipo de dúvida fique a vontade para pensarmos juntos em soluções especiais para suas necessidades.

¡ Quanto o destinatário sabe sobre o assunto?

¡ Quais valores do destinatário que podem afetar a resposta?

¡ Qual a impressão que o destinatário tem a seu respeito?

¡ O que será necessário para convencer o destinatário a agir?

Espero que este artigo amplie suas chances de sucesso.

Caso tenha algum tema que gostaria que refletíssemos juntos, ficamos a disposição.

Até a próxima semana,

Infoco@ch

infocoach@infocoach.org

PS: Dica de lazer

jogo fascinante de advinhacao

http://www.devinettor.com/

usa um modelo de inteligencia artificial.

abrx

Você ficará surpreso com a quantidade de emails que podem ser tratados em menos de um minuto. Sempre temperados com foco e diligência. Caso queira contribuir, são todos muito bem-vindos e aguardamos ansiosos suas dicas e comentários.

Working from a home office as I do, some might think it is easy to balance out work and family. It has its benefits; I can take a 15 minute break and vacuum, walk the dog or put supper in the oven - all things that help my family along. But there are also many challenges that come from having your office in your home.  Overcoming these challenges usually comes down to planning and communicating.  You need to make sure you can do your work, but have your family and friend time as well - in many cases that is why you have your office at your home.

What challenges could I have working at home?

Think about it, when you work in a large corporate office, friends would rarely drop in to chat or have a coffee.  They also think twice about calling you during work, most things can wait. When you have a home office - that separation of work and home is not as clear to everyone.

Working from home means setting your boundaries for everyone, including yourself, and following them; achieving a good balance is possible if you know the limits and expectations. These boundaries will help you have the time with your family and friends that everyone needs to keep them in balance with life.  What kinds of limits?

Here are 5 tips that will help keep you on track to balance your work-family.

1. Let everyone know your work hours and follow them.  Post them on your office door and on your voice mail messages, this way everone knows what to expect from you. Try not to make too many exceptions or you'll find the "work hours" mean nothing.
2. Use Caller ID to help you determine which calls should be answered during office hours.  If it's your kid's school; you may want to pick it up, but if it's Maxine, the neighbourhood gossip, let it go.
3. Set a schedule for breaks and use them to refresh yourself; whether it's to make a quick phone call, do a quick chore; or read some of the paper.  Getting out of your office will do wonders for your mental state!
4. Keep work and family emails separate.  If you are like me and keep in touch with people by email or facebook or you belong to volunteer organizations, make sure you have a separate email address you use for family and things not involving work.  So many people communicate via email, the last thing you need is to miss a vital work-related email because you had missed it sorting thorugh the hundreds of emails in the inbox.  If your emails are unmanageable and keep you from doing your work, you may want to consider hiring a Virtual Assistant to do some email management for you.
5. Set a schedule for reading emails.   This is one task that can really bog your time down if you don't set limits, especially when working alone, it's easy to get lost in reading and answering emails. Lost time can mean tkaing more time to finish work and results in less time with family.

A few simple things to help you separate your work and family and achieve the balance everyone needs.

I must sign off now, it's 3:00 and my office shuts down until 7pm so I can get the kids from school, make supper and play a rousing game of Sorry!

The idea is to reply to all emails using no more than five sentences.

Mike Davidson wrote a great post, titled "A Low-Fi Solution To Email Overload: Sentenc.es", where he explains it in detail:

"Every e-mail I send to anyone, regardless of subject or recipient, will be five sentences or less. Like a cinquain. Ideally, it would be a 160 character count like an SMS message, but since that would require an actual e-mail plug-in (viz. “work”), we’ll go with the much-easier-to-count concept of sentences instead."

The 5 Sentence Rule seems to work for me because:

1- I am naturally long-winded. The constraint of only five sentences forces me to be more concise, which is probably as much a courtesy to the recipient as it is a time-saver for me.

2- I no longer "save emails for when I have more time to reply". Since I know I will only be writing five sentences maximum, there's no use delaying. This makes my response time faster, especially for important emails.

3- I'm noticing that my own emails get answered FASTER when they're short, as people don't have to wade through all the extra to get to the main (actionable) point.

4- As a writer, this will inspire me to put more energy into stuff that has a wider audience (articles, blog posts, essays, etc.) rather than emails.

5- It's been my experience in the past that constraints often make me more creative and productive than total artistic freedom (when I can do ANYTHING, I often do nothing). It reminds me of constrained writing exercises, or Oulipo.

Of course, it's hard to argue that this rule should or could apply to EVERY email. Of course not. But it's a great rule of thumb that is, so far, making me far more "prolific" -- and maybe more readable -- in the email department.

Link (via Mike Davidson)

Hmm, I think this much analysis is enough and proves that the article is readable. Now to actually follow through with it, that's a completely different story...

I recently read a review of the HTC S710 smartphone and was so impressed with the features that I have just ordered it via BT.  If you, like me, already have BT Total Broadband (with an old white Hub) you can upgrade to the newer (black) version and have BT Total Broadband Anywhere for just an extra £5 per month.

I decided to pay a one-off payment of £29.99 to upgrade the handset to the HTC S710.

As anyone reading this blog will know, I have been looking for a smartphone with a Qwerty keyboard for ages and ages and ages ... for an extra £5 per month, I decided to bite the bullet and buy this one ... I'm sure it won't be perfect ... but I think it will do the job I want.

Key features:-

- spring-loaded QWERTY keyboard

- Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0 Standard

- WiFi

- Internet Explorer Mobile

- Windows Live Messenger

- Outlook Contacts easily transferrable to the handset

- View / Edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files

I'll post my own review once I've had chance to make full use of the HTC S710 and would love to hear from anyone who already owns one.

Read the full review here

A couple months ago, we reviewed Xobni's Outlook tool, and it has proved an invaluable tool for day-to-day work. Since its already a killer app for us marketing and PR folk who make a living by the volume and management of our contacts, it's no surprise that Xobni has become even more useful with a LinkedIn integration.

We also put LinkedIn's Outlook toolbar to the test. While we still think LinkedIn's Outlook app is worth it for the grab function alone (makes creating new vCards a breeze), Xobni has engineered a seamless integration that enhances usefulness with the addition of pictures, current job information, and other pertinent tidbits that help make the most of your network.

As a PR pro, I already trust LinkedIn as one way to make sure I have all the right info on my contact, including their geographic location, job title, and place of employment. The volatile nature of the media industry requires that you do your homework before you hit send, and Xobni makes it all the more simple with the addition of LinkedIn's data.

One thing Chris and I noticed when looking at the toolbar is that sometimes the contact information pulled directly from e-mail conversations isn't 100% accurate. These inaccuracies have been consistent with Xobni since day one, which is why I tend to ignore the contact field, saving the nuts and bolts contact info for my vCards in Outlook. That said, it would be nice to have a greater level of trust for the information automatically generated by the program.

Another problem is that many people don't have a LinkedIn profile yet (I know, collective gasp!) and even if they do, they probably don't take advantage of features such as picture additions. While the integration is clearly useful, it's not evident on a large scale yet. As LinkedIn and Xobni grow in popularity and scope, these kinds of issues should improve, making an already useful service completely indispensable.

If Xobni, for one reason or another, doesn't boot up with my Outlook, it's a crisis. It's just so easy to find what I need quickly and easily. I really don't think I could live without it after experiencing its utility.

So GO, download it now if you haven't already, and join the other savvy marketers and PR pros who are using it to streamline their communications. You won't regret it

Don’t miss out: Got RSS? [what’s that?]. Or, start your morning with socialTNT in your InBox!

Contributing writer Marie Williams also blogs at www.flackette.com about PR and agency life. Connect with her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Do you suffer from email overload?

I do (occasionally).

How do I manage email overload? I look to OHIO.

Only-Handle-It-Once.

My inbox is not cluttered with messages. In fact, I rarely have more than 30 emails in my inbox. I do this by responding to urgent emails, deleting irrelevant emails, using flags in Outlook to schedule later to-dos, filing FYIs, avoiding the "thanks" or reply-all messages, and asking friends and family to refrain from sending me junk.

Just recently, I was dealing with an over-enthusiastic emailing colleague at work. I created a filter in Outlook, routed her emails to a special folder and reviewed the folder once per week. Sanity quickly returned.

How do you manage your inbox?

Take a look at this interesting post on Beth's blog.

With the pending roll out of Microsoft Communicator 2007 for APS in all geographies I feel confident we have one of the 3 implemented.  Implementing an IM solution is very straight forward.  We chose Microsoft beacuse it integrates with Exchange but a feature I quite like is the ability to save IM conversations into Outlook and from there into our Document Management system Worksite.  Our IT team had some initial struggles but have managed to sort these out with the help of Microsoft.  Rolling it out to the desktop is very easy so I recommend trailing this solution - you get a 180 day trial (I think).

As for the other Wikis I am looking forward to our next steps in relation to building Wiki based content and will keep you posted on our progress.  Blogs - I'll keep forcing myself to use this is as a mechanism to communicate conversations and experiences for our team and clients alike.  Its all about discipline to avoid email where its not a necssary mechanism for communicating.  

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.527465&w=425&h=350&fv=docId%3D973149761529535925%26playerMode%3Dsimple%26hl%3Den] from www.43folders.com posted with vodpod

To illustrate this from my own life, last month I took a one-day seminar on time and e-mail management. I came away with some great tips and a new system to try out.

The tips, as I said, were great — definitely a time saver. Did you know you can set up template shortcuts that run from Outlook? This alone was worth the course. Now my frequently used files such as invoices and course brochures are generated with one mouse click.

Other parts of the course did not ’stick’ so to speak.  It was an organization system based on Steven Covey’s book 7 Habits, using the 4 quadrants (Important/Urgent, Not Important/Urgent, etc.) I love this approach and was excited to try it. 

It took me the better part of a day to set it up: the folders with the 4 quadrants, the colour coded category flags for individual messages and finally moving messages around to their new homes.

What I quickly found is that it actually took more time because each piece of e-mail required more complicated decisions:

1. What quadrant does it fall into?
2. Do I even want to keep it?
3. What category is it?
4. How easily do I need to access it again?

Within a week I went back to my original e-mail filing system which is what I learned from Sally McGee, in her book “Take Back your Life.” Her method worked well for me but was a bit out of date. Easily fixed, though.  

So what is the lesson here?  Be willing to explore different approaches and then use what works for you. Leave what does not work as well behind and in so doing, you will become the expert in your own life and create your own organization systems.

In case you are curious about that book, here it is:

© Deborah Redfern 2008. All rights reserved.

Whether Journalist or Public Relations professional, your contacts are your currency. Last month, socialTNT gave TechCrunch40 darling, Xobni, a test spin. This month, the socialTNT BetaBreakers team put popular professional social network LinkedIn's Outlook Toolbar through our rigorous testing process.

All You Ever Need to Know: The "Grabbing" Function is Magic

• By far, the best thing about the toolbar is the "grab" function. It makes it devastatingly simple to transfer contact information seamlessly into your Outlook contact list.
• How it Works: When you have an e-mail open from the person you want to add, highlight their signature block, click on the little grab button on the top right-hand corner of your menu, and voila! All the contact information is entered in the appropriate boxes. Sometimes fields get switch, such as "company" and "title," but it's a small inconvenience that doesn't detract from the feature's utility. Check out the screenshots below for a visual:

[Click to enlarge]

• Just do it: If your contact list is key to your business success, you cannot be without this amazing resource. Go download it. NOW. :)

There's No Place Like LinkedIn Home to Manage Your Networking Savvy

• Your LinkedIn home page can be easily accessed through your Outlook, and the interface is clean and aesthetically pleasing. It's easy to track your inbound messages, friend updates, profile views, and all the other features that LinkedIn provides.
• Bottom Line: If you live and die by your LinkedIn network, you will love how simple it is to manage your connections without ever leaving your inbox.

Don't Press That Button! The Danger of the Dashboard...

• The toolbar's "Dashboard" feature lets you see contacts to invite to LinkedIn, contact information updates for your LinkedIn friends, and keep-in-touch reminders. It's a hybrid of your e-mail and your LinkedIn account homepage.
• If you press the button, it takes anywhere from 2-5 minutes to load, which is a long time for us ADD techies accustomed to split second satisfaction.
• Why you should pass: Xobni's search function is way more intuitive and lightning fast. The utility of the information on the dashboard is negligible and more easily found via Xobni.

Hello Promo!

Beyond the uber useful grab tool, 85% of the LinkedIn Outlook toolbar is clearly a promotion of LinkedIn's contact management services and will only work for you if you're a) already an avid user of the network or b) think you want to start becoming more involved in that community.

That's a Wrap

Our overall impression is that while Xobni reigns supreme when it comes to inbox add-ons, LinkedIn's grabbing feature makes it more than worth the download. Think of Xobni as your full-service inbox search solution, while the LinkedIn toolbar provides some "Ah ha!" features you'll come to rely on. If your a LinkedIn Junkie, download it NOW!

Don’t miss a post: Please add socialTNT to your RSS reader [what’s that?]. Better yet, subscribe to socialTNT by email!

Google doesn't recognize text after a plus-sign (+)

Suppose I have different types of email I receive. I have a blog and people mail me in response to a post, suppose I also podcast, receive church e-mail, university email in the same inbox. Is there a way to sort these emails out?

Yes, there is! Just add a plus (+) after your account name and it will still turn up in your inbox. Creat a rule to make gmail label those emails automagically. You only need to view your different categories for new mail, the times you have to sift through your mail manually are finally over!

For example. Take our model citizen John Doe. He is a blogger, a podcaster, goes to church, to university, teaches students and has only one gmail account. Using the plus sign, his aliases would be: john.doe+blog at gmail. com, john.doe+podcast, john.doe+university, john.doe+teaching. He then sets gmail up creating rules to apply different labels to the different aliases and he can choose if the rules makes the mail skips his inbox or not. Checking mail was never easier!

Gmail or googlemail?

In some countries (like Germany) gmail is officially called googlemail due to legal issues. But did you know that every gmail user also has a googlemail address? John Doe will receive his email sent to john.doe at gmail.com and john.doe at googlemail.com both in the same inbox. He can give different people his email and create rules to sort the incoming mail out. Isn't that neat?

Dots in your email addresses

If you have created an email address with a dot (e.g. john.doe at gmail.com) all mail that uses variations will also end up in you inbox, (e.g. johndoe at gmail.com, j.o.h.n.d.o.e at gmail.com). This way it's possible to change your reply-to address or to give different versions of your address to different people. John Doe, for example, can give friends the john.doe address and family the johndoe- address. He can filter mail and add labels 'friends' and 'family' to mails sent to the different aliases.

Link:

• Zero Inbox (43 folders series)

I think Ratcliffe is right on. There is a fine difference between the use of personal records and public records. Electronically stored information (ESI) which relates directly to the President and his job as head of the United States, is PUBLIC information. I am sure there are limited exceptions and so on and so forth, but his "personal stuff," the way he phrased it, is not at all accurate. Email archiving solutions, especially in the case of political activity, are truly important measures to have in place to make sure that there is nothing going on that shouldn't be. Governot Matt Blunt of Missouri has made the news recently in EXACTLY the same way. I agree with Ratcliffe that we cannot let this kind of activity slide. It is time that email archiving be taken seriously.

What goes on behind the scenes really is amazing sometimes, even though this situation has been in the making for many years. How did it not go public that the file directories used to store the retained email were accessible by everyone on the EOP network in 2005? Roles based permission access is a serious facet of any quality email archiving solution, especially in our nations highest political facility. How could the white house just refuse so many warnings and requests to update their system? How could the president just disregard laws that COMPEL him to archive email? Perhaps the best quote is right here: Stephen McDevitt, an official in the presidential CIO office, "told the committee that a new e-mail archiving system that would have addressed the problems was ready to go live on Aug. 21, 2006. But CIO Theresa Payton canceled the new system in 2006, because it would have required modifications and additional spending." What? It was canceled for modifications and additional spending? Email archiving is a critical item for the president that is necessitated by law. It is nothing short of wild that Payton gave modifications and additional spending as a reason against its implementation.

By Kelly Sims

If you are anything like me, you are bombarded with email. In Particular, you get messages from clients, spammers, friends, family and associations or groups of which you are a member. Without proper preparation for such a massive amount of email, you might find yourself swimming in email. Email was created to be a tool to save you time, but if you can’t find an effective way to organize it, you will most definitely be losing time to it instead of gaining time from it. The following are some ideas that will help you use your email program to save time:

* If your email’s spam filter isn’t doing a good job catching unwanted emails, check its settings. Usually in your email options, there will be junk email settings. Set the protection to a higher level. This should take care of at least a little more of the unwanted spam. If you have your email set to a high level already and are still receiving lots of spam, consider getting spam blocking software. Googling “stop spam” or “spam blocker” will give you a large list of options from which to choose.

* Consider setting up an autoresponder. An autoresponder can handle a great deal of general questions that you get on a regular basis. All you have to do is set it up once and your message(s) can go out hundreds or even thousands of times. Autoresponders are also great at sales, so to speak. They do all the work for you. When someone opts in to your list, you can set up your autoresponder to send a series of messages in a specific order at set intervals.

* Save commonly sent email messages as signatures. Signatures don’t only have to be actual signatures. You can save whole email messages as signatures and name them accordingly. For example, if you commonly follow-up with individuals you have met at your local Chamber of Commerce meetings, you could title your signature “follow-up” and save a message such as:

“Dear Mr. X,

It was such a pleasure to meet you at the last Chamber meeting. I hope that we have a chance to speak again at...”

Of course you would have to change details such as the name the email is addressed to, along with other more specific information, but the template will be ready within a few clicks of your mouse.

* Read and respond to email at set intervals throughout the day. Checking your email as messages come in is most definitely a common mistake that people make. Stopping the work you are doing to check email is extremely inefficient. Your tasks will take much longer to complete if they are subject to constant interruptions. Set a recurring reminder on your email calendar to check email 4 times per day. Only check and respond when you are scheduled to do so.

* Separate your email into folders. Just as you organize your documents into folders on your computer, so should you with your email. A good organizational system will make it much easier to find what you need when you need it. You can also set up rules in some programs so that your email gets automatically sorted as it arrives.

* Color code your email. Some email programs such as MS Outlook allow you to color code your email based on certain criteria, such as who it’s from or the subject of the message. This will allow you to more easily differentiate between important and insignificant emails. For example, if you color code all of your client emails in red, then you will easily be able to see them within a sea of email.

Email is a great tool if it is used properly. When it’s not, it can have a very negative effect on your time management. By learning to implement even a few of these simple steps, you can become a more efficient email user and stop losing time to a technology that was meant to help you save it.

Kelly Sims is a Virtual Assistant and Owner of Virtually There VA Services. To find out if you should simplify your life, please take the "Simplify Your Life" quiz at =>http://www.virtuallythereva.com/quiz.html . While you are there, don't forget to register to receive her new free mini e-book, "How to Add 2 Hours to Your Day: Lessons in Efficiency". Virtually There VA Services can be found on the web at =>http://www.virtuallythereva.com .

Find free, high quality articles you can republish from www.copypastearticles.com

At least in terms of electronic communication, it might be time for some hospitals to turn to outsourced email archiving.  Encryption, security, and access are all issues for health care providers right now, and these are three issues that email archiving services are well equipped to handle. It is time for hospitals to address the quality and success of their electronic patient data backup and protection.  With HIPAA security audits right around the corner, the time to wait before integrating an email compliance solution is really over.

"Email archiving solutions should address critical customer requirements around email information archiving, eDiscovery, regulatory compliance, business continuity, and storage optimization. Enterprise-class solutions provide legal search work flow, immediate mailbox and message recovery, disaster recovery, email archiving, and self-service search and access in one solution. By leveraging cost-effective storage, these solutions also optimize email storage and reduce overall infrastructure costs. Next generation email archiving solutions deliver rapid, comprehensive search across millions of emails for litigation ready production and provide the following capabilities:

Rapid eDiscovery: Auditors and legal staff must be able to quickly perform sophisticated search and discovery across centrally managed mailboxes to meet compliance requirements.

Automated, Exchange Disaster Recovery: Reliably protect Exchange information through non-invasive, continuous application shadowing. This process preserves the consistency and integrity of Exchange data and enables "one-click" full email data and service recovery when needed.

Mailbox Storage Management: Reduce storage requirements on the Exchange Server by migrating or "extending" attachments based on policies of age, document size, or mailbox size.

Self-service search of archived data: Seamless self-service access to end-user archived data, enabling them to find potentially lost or deleted messages without IT assistance.

Enhanced support for Exchange 2007: Live Communication Server (IM) and 64 bit Servers - extends content management to include instant messaging and takes advantage of new Exchange 2007 features for disaster recovery, folder level retention, and mailbox level journaling.

Automated PST File Archiving: New "crawler" automatically searches and retrieves PST files from servers, desktops, and laptops based on administrator-defined policies.

Active Directory Integration: Leverages roles defined in Active Directory and provides a version history of Active Directory, including distribution lists. Contents of distribution lists are viewed as they appeared when an email was originally sent or received.

Public Folder Archiving: Performs archiving and continuous data protection for Public Folders and allows auditors to search all Public Folder content and re-create chain-of-custody for compliance and legal discovery.

Scalable Storage & Reduced Archive Storage Requirements: Designed to deliver improved scalability and performance for the archive server with support for multiple databases and extensible storage volumes.

Each of the above criteria is highly relevant in ensuring a smooth email litigation process should such a situation arise. However, does relevancy equal necessity? Which of these factors are truly "business critical"? How essential is having support for Exchange 2007? Does a company need public folder archiving? When does storage really become a problem? Are the above capabilities best used in an in-house or an outsourced email archiving solution? I believe it is important for a business to understand what they need to comply with corporate regulations and legal requirements without spending money and time on things that are simply not necessary. What are the intricate parts of an email archiver that you truly NEED to satisfy compliance? I would like to address this topic in full soon. Stay tuned.