The Solution to Email Overload? No Email
December 4, 2011
I enjoy France and the French. The country is essentially an engineering outfit with a soft spot for art, a love of intellectual discussion, and a clever approach to thorny problems. Consider email. At Atos, the senior management has found a solution to email overload, the risks of eDiscovery, and the cost of trying to manage unfindable PowerPoint attachments. (My hunch is that the news report missed some of the story, but, hey, that’s okay.
How? Here’s what I learned in “Tech Firm Implements Employee ‘Zero Email’ Policy.” Let’s assume ABC News has the facts lined up like Napoleon’s army before it did the Moscow in Autumn thing. Here’s what I learned:
The company says by 2013, more than half of all new digital content will be the result of updates to, and editing of existing information. Middle managers spend more than 25 percent of their time searching for information, according to the company. Crouch said Atos is evaluating a number of new tools to replace internal email including collaborative and social media tools. Those include the Atos Wiki, which allows all employees to communicate by contributing or modifying online content, and Office Communicator, the company’s online chat system which allows video conferencing, and file and application sharing.
So “zero” does not mean zero. Social interactions are not email. Okay, ABC News, close enough for horseshoes. I assume the cloud, Gmail, and various on premises solutions along the lines of SharePoint and Exchange would not work.
The reality is that email is going to be tough to eliminate even if one calls the outputs “collaboration” with a “social” twist of lemon. No lemonade here, however. Search vendors can rest easy. Atos is a prospect. Symantec, HP, and Recommind can make sales calls confident that non-email digital information must be searched, made findable, and discoverable by avocats which are lawyers no matter what one calls these fine professionals.
Stephen E Arnold, December 4, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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One Response to “The Solution to Email Overload? No Email”
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I would add that Atos is a customer of Sinequa, one of our largest deployment in Europe. I can confirm that they index lots of content in wikis, collaborative portals to be able to cope with this information explosion!