How do you meet?

Its your lucky day! Your project just got the funding which you have been asking for four months now! Now, to get the ball rolling and start the product development process as fast as you can. You need to call in a meeting with your team immediately. For the meeting, you need to have Mike from Los Angeles, Sanjay from Bangalore, India, Brent from Boston and Linda from your office, here in California. And of course, you need to make sure that John, the VP who works out of the New York office is also present.

So, you set out to create a meeting request email in your friendly and trusty Outlook. You put down the probable free times and the location details. You then send out the email and wait to get back the responses. You do get responses but not the kind that you had in mind! Mike has a conflict on those times and cannot do it. Sanjay has not even replied to the email, Linda is on leave on that day and John is way over booked for that day.

What a nightmare! How do you make all of these raging individuals agree to a common time date and location? How do you get them to respond quickly? How much time are you going to spend to try and organize this meeting? How do you make sure that all participants will remember to come for this meeting? And God forbid, if you have to cancel the meeting for some reason! What chaos will it create?

Does this sound all too familiar to you? Have you ‘been there and done that’? Have you felt this pain before?

Well, we felt the pain too and decided to do something about it. We started to work on a new product called Zytoo. The product details will be out very soon but in the mean while, you can help us with taking our 1 minute survey. Or just comment on this blog.
All your feedbacks will help us tremendously.

Together, we CAN build a better product for managing our meeting scheduling mess!

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Take the Zytoo 1 minute survey

Email Attachments – Much more attached then just the attachments…

One of the main reasons for the unprecedented adoption of email has been its ability to attach documents. In one simple action, any one can send any document in any format to anyone in any part of the world. This is just beautiful!

As users increasingly start using emails as a medium for collaboration and document exchange, they don’t realize the underlying cost associated with their actions! Steadily and surely, emails are getting expensive to maintain as administration, bandwidth, and storage costs rise. Based on a ‘Messaging Total Cost of Ownership’ survey performed by the Radicati Group, it was found in an enterprise, email costs an average of $159/user/year to maintain, beyond the original purchase price of hardware and software. A major cause of this cost is email attachments which make up more than 85% of all email data. In fact 20% of all emails contain attachments, but as much as 92% of email resources are consumed by attachments.

Attachments are costly to transmit, process, and administer as email storage. Research shows that the average corporate email user sends and receives over 4MB of email attachments per day. For a company with 5,000 email users, that adds up to about 22 GB per day, 109GB per week, or approximately 435GB per month. When translated into cost, these figures become much more tangible. Assuming that an average company sets mailbox quotas at 40MB per user, with the average "loaded" cost of storage being about $2/MB, it costs approximately $80 per user, per year, to store email messages-most of which are attachments. One of the main reasons in the increase in attachments sizes is the proliferation of all kinds of digital files in our daily lives. Incoming Faxes, Scanned Images, Audio and Video clips, Presentations, Photographs all add up to the average attachment size.

Thus enterprises are facing a daunting list of challenges which can be enumerated and summarized as follows:

1. Server Load Levels:
As emails with attachments pass through the email servers, tests results using the MAPI Messaging Benchmark 2 (MMB2) demonstrate that the average processing loads on email servers like Microsoft Exchange is substantially higher by 350% for emails with attachments than for emails without attachments. And these server load levels are only going to increase as more emails with bigger attachments are sent out by users

2. Multiple Versions and Duplicates of an Attachment:
Interestingly, in a typical organization, out of the total number of email attachments, only 22% of them are original documents while the rest of them are either revisions or duplicates.

The numerous versions of an attachment created by all its recipients represent a greater challenge to the sender to collate all the changes together and form the final version, thereby resulting in more time and effort spent at lower productivity levels.

At any given time, none of the recipients are guaranteed to have the latest version of the attachment. This leads to confusion and misunderstandings among the recipients, resulting in longer decision making times and slowing down the corporate business process.

The duplicates of an attachment hoard up additional storage space while increasing network traffic leading to higher network administration and maintenance costs.

3. Security Issues with Attachments:
In today's world of a heightened sense of security, email attachments represent the single most point of vulnerability for corporate document security plans. Once shared, these attachments become public property with their recipients being completely free to do whatever they please to do with it. There is no way to stop a wayward employee to just walk away with sensitive attachments sitting neatly on his/her computer hard disk as local copies. Senders have no control over the access rights of their attachments neither can ever know what their recipients are doing with it.

So the next time, you have the urge to send out that cool animation file of 3 MB size to all your friends, pause and think about the costs associated with your action. There is a price to pay for this. Someone somewhere is paying for it, if not you directly!

Email, Email everywhere – But not the one that I need!

Email is the center of our worlds today. Everyday our inboxes are flooded with emails; work related emails, family related and those pesky junk mails. We end up spending a good portion of our daily lives over emails, managing, sorting and organizing them. Email has become the de facto standard for all our collaboration needs.

Most companies have setup elaborate collaboration tools and applications to handle the collaboration needs. But they have quickly realized that no one really uses them. Everyone always falls back on emails. The last mile of most business process is almost always achieved over emails.

Let’s observe a typical project management process of any company:

1. The Project Manager sends out an email to all team members with some design documents as attachments and requests their comments
2. The team members reply to the email with their comments
3. Some of the team members update the attachments with their comments and/or attach new documents to their emails as part of the conversation.
4. The Project Manager sends out more emails explaining and detailing the issues. A fierce conversation ensures!
5. At the end of it all, the Project Manager collates briefs from all email conversations, organizes the changes made to the attachments into one master document and updates the team members

Issues with the process:

1. Chaos and confusion as to who said what, when and to whom
2. Impossible to find out where is the latest version of which document
3. Tremendous loss of man hours and productivity on everyone's part to keep track of the process and its latest status
4. Cluttered up inboxes from the huge number of emails that went back and forth

Does this sound familiar? If so, what have you done to resolve them? If you have done something, then please share it with us. If you have done nothing, then why do accept it as-is?

Email – Victim of its own success?

Electronic mail aka email, is a great communications tool that benefits from extreme ease-of-use and near ubiquity. It’s the 'Killer application' of the century. Like the telephone, email is used to easily connect people across organizational and geographic boundaries. Individuals from multitudes of organizations use email to work together to create and review content, consider options, make decisions, and coordinate all types of business processes. Email is being used by governments to discuss how to bring about world peace and by scientists searching for a cure for cancer. Thus email has become the de facto standard for collaboration

Yet email has become a victim of its own success. Unmanageable volumes of business- and non business-related email are hampering worker productivity and increasing email storage and maintenance costs. We end up spending a good portion of our days in managing, sorting, filtering and organizing our emails

The Issues Within:

Just because people have started using emails extensively for all possible reasons does not mean that it is suited best for handling all possible collaboration requirements. Email was designed, in all its simplicity and grace to transfer text messages between two points of communication.

a) Fundamentally Unstructured, Unorganized and Uncategorized data:
The context of an email is in its body. Thus the importance or value of the email for its users is in what it holds in its body. Yet the data in the body of the email is unstructured, unorganized and uncategorized. Such data leads to loss of information with no ability to retrieve it easily and meaningfully at a later date.

b) Does a poor job of enabling a group of people to Share and Discuss information and arrive at a decision in a short period of time:
Document attachments and sharing is one of the prime reasons for the widespread use and success of email. But it is difficult to compile and keep track of revisions to attachments and comments.

c) Creates a huge Security Risk as multiple copies of attached documents are made for every recipient:
Senders of email have no control over these local copies of their documents shared with their email's recipients.

d) Creates Spotty Conversation Threads:
It's difficult for any person in a particular conversation thread to get the whole picture with the history of changes made by everybody involved.

e) Encourages Occupational Spam:
Within enterprises, well-intended individuals sending a business or personal email may without any extra effort copy or "cc" more people than necessary.
When the email carries a huge attachment, such as slides or an audio or video file, this action wastes precious time, storage, and network resources.

f) Cannot have real time knowledge of the recipient's Email Behavior:
Senders of email have no clue as to what really happened with their emails once they have reached their recipients or as to what the recipient is doing with it without again sending out a bunch of emails or making phone calls to know about the statues of their first email!

g) No Integration with backend business applications and systems:
Users have to be content with 'Cut, Copy, Paste' to transfer data between their emails and their business application systems

So, has email become a victim of its own success? Are people over stretching and abusing the email system? Is there a solution to this mess?