Bryan Dreller, ColdSpark Account Services Director
By now, you realize the power and value of e-mail as a communication tool, and you know it’s here to stay. You have probably been sending customer care emails for a while; whether marketing, transactional notifications, alerts, etc., or perhaps all of these. And if so, you understand that it’s critical to have visibility into each of these customer touch points in order to arm you with a 360-degree view into the customer engagement life cycle and cross-sell opportunities.
The problem is you now have to manage a complex messaging platform that may or may not integrate with your existing CRM, website, or e-commerce systems, and IT resources—personnel and infrastructure—can be costly. Beyond IT, you have the added duties of managing ISP relations and deliverability challenges.
Purchasing an in-house solution to meet these challenges can help with the technology & integration, but the costs to both technically and tactically manage an in-house messaging platform remain.
Of course, not all organizations have the budget and resources to purchase and manage an enterprise-class email platform. A managed Software as a Service solution affords small businesses the opportunity to leverage the same enterprise messaging solutions implemented on-site at Fortune 100 companies; and ideally, without sacrificing performance and customer engagement capabilities. By providing essential services such as ISP relations, deliverability and inbox monitoring, real-time connection monitoring, inbound message handling, dedicated IPs and industry expertise, an effective managed solution allows IT to focus on more mission-critical issues. Lastly, this type of solution can be implemented very quickly, including real-time Web Services integration with existing systems.
We see this as a highly effective option to reduce the costs and complexities of managing your organization’s most mission-critical communication channel: email.
In Part I of this discussion we talked about how e-mail is the major application for healthcare organizations to communicate with members, partners and internally. However, healthcare organizations, given compliance and regulatory requirements, face challenges with regards to securing, retaining and accessing required e-mail over long periods of time. Last time we covered compliance and litigation support and automated email systems. Now we turn to the issues surrounding e-mail archiving migration and integration and how to future proof e-mail archiving solutions.
E-mail Archiving Migration and Integration
With the ever-changing nature of today’s business and regulatory environments, organizations can face new challenges that change their e-mail archiving requirements. Unfortunately, given their unique architectures and requirements, once these solutions are deployed it is nearly impossible to change or migrate from one system to another. This means that as an organization’s business, compliance or regulatory requirements change that they are forced into making their existing solution meet the new requirements. Merger and acquisition activities in the healthcare industry also create challenges in being able to integrate disparate archiving solutions to meet the requirements of the new organization. Fortunately, messaging platforms are available to help organizations change, migrate and integrate e-mail archiving solutions. Messaging platforms complement, not replace, e-mail archiving solutions and allow organizations to migrate to the solution that best meets their current business and regulatory requirements. They provide seamless migration from one system to another, allowing organizations to centrally manage and control disparate archiving solutions and provide more consistency for compliance, discovery and litigation support across disparate archiving solutions.
Today e-mail is a major vehicle for healthcare organizations to communicate with members, partners and other constituents. Securely capturing and retaining host-based e-mail with an e-mail archiving solution is no longer good enough to meet business, compliance and regulatory requirements.
Future Proofing E-mail Archiving
The changing landscape of e-mail archiving and host-based e-mail systems, such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes, creates additional challenges when trying to map out a long-term e-mail archiving strategy. Many of the current e-mail archiving solutions require defined interfaces to the host e-mail systems to capture messages to archive. Over time these interfaces can be changed or disappear completely from the host e-mail systems. Such is the case with Microsoft’s Messaging Application Protocol Interface, or MAPI. MAPI has been a standard interface that many e-mail archiving solutions have designed their products around to capture messages that are generated and received by Exchange. Unfortunately, Microsoft has already announced that MAPI will be phased out in future releases of Exchange. This means that the existing e-mail archiving solutions designed around MAPI will need to be redesigned. Existing users of these solutions may need to plan for costly upgrades to software and infrastructure to ensure these systems will be able to support upcoming changes.
Forward-thinking organizations are beginning to realize that there is a different solution that reduces potential costs and risks around these future changes. These organizations are looking toward messaging platforms to extend their current e-mail archiving solutions by leveraging current standards, such as SMTP. This allows them to future proof their e-mail infrastructure by designing and deploying an archiving strategy today that will work with future environmental changes.
Closing the Gaps
Today e-mail is a major vehicle for healthcare organizations to communicate with members, partners and other constituents. Securely capturing and retaining host-based e-mail with an e-mail archiving solution is no longer good enough to meet business, compliance and regulatory requirements. Healthcare organizations need to consider a more centralized approach to helping them manage their messaging infrastructure that helps them close existing gaps in their e-mail archiving strategy. Messaging platforms help healthcare organizations to maintain compliance objectives while designing and deploying e-mail infrastructure that is designed future environmental changes. They also provide a greater level of control, visibility, manageability and extensibility to e-mail operations.
E-mail is the major application for healthcare organizations to communicate with members, partners and internally. However healthcare organizations, given compliance and regulatory requirements, face challenges with regards to securing, retaining and accessing required e-mail over long periods of time. The solution for many organizations has been to deploy e-mail archiving solutions to capture and retain e-mail and electronic discovery solutions to identify and access required e-mail. Here are several areas to consider when designing an e-mail archiving strategy to avoid potential gaps.
Compliance and Litigation Support
Given the growth of e-mail, and the onset of other forms of messaging such as SMS texts, healthcare organizations are challenged to meet their compliance and regulatory requirements with their current solutions. While e-mail archiving solutions play a vital role in helping organizations capture and retain e-mail messages sent from host based e-mail systems, such as Microsoft Exchange, most organizations fail to consider how to optimally structure messages in their archive. This limits the effectiveness and increases the time required to perform electronic discovery and support litigation or regulatory requests to retrieve archived messages. Applying policies to e-mail prior to archiving is an effective solution to improving the effectiveness of required searches and reduces search times. For example, being able to segregate e-mail based upon user type or business function into dedicated archives is one method that organizations are beginning to leverage to accomplish this. By separating messages by user type or business function, organizations can perform more targeted searches and return results in a more timely fashion. Electronic discovery and litigation support can also be enhanced by providing custom meta data extensions that align with business processes, organizational structure or type of message to increase the speed and accuracy of searches.
Given the growth of e-mail, and the onset of other forms of messaging such as SMS texts, healthcare organizations are challenged to meet their compliance and regulatory requirements with their current solutions.
Automated Systems E-mail
E-mail generated by non-host based e-mail systems, automated systems such as transactional or customer relationship systems, is another potential gap in current e-mail archiving strategies. In many organizations this type of e-mail can account for up to 25% of all messages. Because of their architectural requirements, many e-mail archiving solutions are unable to capture and retain messages generated and received by these systems. The operational benefits of these automated systems are significant, but organizations need to ensure that they are able to capture and archive messages from these systems as part of their archiving strategy. Messaging platforms that integrate with existing e-mail archiving systems allow organizations to extend their existing system to capture and archive messages generated by these automated systems as part of their archiving strategy. These platforms provide a centralized approach and a single archive, for both host-based and automated systems e-mail, to maintain compliance, discovery and litigation support objectives without any performance or infrastructure impact to existing host-based e-mail operations.
In Part II, we’ll discuss e-mail archiving migration and integration and how to future-proof e-mail archiving systems.
In this podcast we explore ColdSpark’s solutions for the healthcare industry. Sr. VP & GM Scott Brown shares how ColdSpark is addressing paperless healthcare, compliance and email automation and how ColdSpark’s solutions can help healthcare organizations significantly reduce IT costs while improving customer communications and relationships.
In this podcast ColdSpark’s Scott Brown discusses technology issues facing the healthcare industry and how to harness enterprise messaging infrastructures to meet compliance and archiving demands, improve customer communications and implement email automation and paperless healthcare initiatives.
