Networkworld.com has recently conducted a study asking decision-makers in midsized and large organizations in North America about how concerned they were on a variety of issues. Here are some of the results:

Email archiving:
- 36% of decision-makers are more concerned about the need to archive e-mail today than they were 12 months ago.
- 30% are more concerned about e-discovery issues than they were a year ago. Only 12% and 13% of decision makers are less concerned about e-mail archiving and e-discovery, respectively.

Security issues:
- 12% are more concerned today than a year ago about this eventuality, while more than twice as many are less concerned
- Decision makers are significantly more concerned about spyware infecting their networks while even more are concerned about Web-based threats and the amount of spam that they receive.

In today’s business environments, we often hear the term ‘high-availability’. Whether a hardware or software solution, we aim for redundancy at all levels, so as to maximize the availability of mission-critical services and operations.


1. Introduction
This white paper discusses a high-availability solution for the AXIGEN Mail Server, using the Heartbeat package with DRBD.

AXIGEN is a proprietary messaging solution while both Heartbeat and DRBD are open source software released under the GNU Public License (GPL). These software packages can be used together to build scalable and highly available integrated cluster messaging applications on the Linux operating system.

One of the more important benefits of unified messaging - the integration of e-mail, voice and fax communications in a single mailbox - is the time savings that it affords users. Here's a stab at quantifying just the voicemail-related benefits of unified messaging:

• Assume that the typical user receives five voicemails per day. During a 250-day work year, the typical user would receive 1,250 voicemails.
• Further assume that a single voicemail accessed by telephone takes an average of 30 seconds to process, while one in a unified mailbox takes only 10 seconds. In the latter case, there are visual cues (e.g., the identity of the number that called you) that speeds the processing time per message.

Using these assumptions, a user would spend 10 hours 25 minutes per year processing voicemails via telephone, or 3 hours 28 minutes per year processing them in a unified messaging system. At a fully burdened annual salary of $80,000 for that user, the savings of nearly seven hours per year translates to a savings of $267 per user per year. In an organization of 2,500 users, that translates to productivity savings of nearly $670,000 annually.

Forrester Research has a new report out that offers some insights into the communications technologies that enterprises are adopting -- and are still holding off on. There's also a provocative data point on how involved business unit executives are in Unified Communications purchases.

The respondents were asked how much influence three types of roles have in UC purchasing decisions. The biggest influencers were IT executives, not surprisingly: 26% of respondents said these folks exert final decision-making authority, while 52% reported that IT execs wield "heavy influence" on UC buying. Notably, this was very close to the numbers regarding the influence of telecom executives: 23% of respondents said telecom was the final UC decision-maker for their enterprise, and another 51% ranked telecom as a "heavy" influencer.[...]

The factor that Forrester calls out as important is the last category, "A business unit executive who works with the telecom and/or IT departments." And this is pretty noteworthy: 15% of the survey respondents said this type of exec holds final decision-making authority for UC in their enterprises, another 43% see "heavy influence" here, and 34% say such execs hold "some influence" on the UC buying decsion.

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.

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.
  - 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.
  - 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.

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.