Last week a new employee asked me a question that I can’t seem to get out of my mind. The question: “Do all companies have an email backbone or do they all need an email backbone and don’t always know it?” Of course, I answered the question as best I could, but the wheels in my head have been spinning ever since. Today I decided to take action. I’ve drafted a list of all the ways an enterprise can benefit if they have a strong email backbone:
- Automatic insertion of various disclaimers in the message body (vs. being done in groupware) by group, location, line of business, subsidiary, entity etc. all centrally managed (domain and attribute based).
- Off-load the MS Exchange routing environment (increase/enhance performance of the mail system) by moving policy management away from groupware to handle messages going from one Exchange server to another location.
- Centralized monitoring, handling, and management of all “email generating applications” not just the groupware system (i.e. webmail HTTP forms, hosted SaaS systems like Salesforce.com emails, etc.).
- Allowed mixed business messaging goals from various departments and locations to be implemented with a single control point/platform (vs. separate system administration).
- Central management control of SMTP traffic by group, individual, subject, or location – generate internal alerts, automatic customer notifications, control message size limitations, determine message sender authorizations, decide what applications allowed to be sent, determinate what email addresses need to be blocked or reviewed or limited – including public email systems.
- Optimize intelligent archiving and classification of messages for compliance, regulatory, or governance reporting/retrieval.
- Automatic determination of encryption need and execution before sending based upon content, sender, recipient, domain, etc.
- Change message header information to disguise locations or identities of senders, recipients, and/or locations for high security.
- “Future proof” the messaging infrastructure with unlimited granular and scalable flexibility to meet any changing environment.
- Immediate directory synchronization to support a single domain and single boundary after a merger or acquisition event resulting in multiple domains, locations, identities.
Ultimately, what I’ve come up with is that the answer to the question is really “All companies have an email backbone,” however, some could be considered spineless if they cannot do the things above!
Would you agree?