HighContrast

I gave up on using folders for email management a while back for a number of reasons:

• No single hierarchy works well for me. I don’t think I’m unique in that respect. Humans generally have a hard time with cut and dry delineations, which is why uber-taxonomies have mostly failed but folksonomy usage is growing.
• Folders complicate search and discovery as they create sometimes artificial buckets of information. When you type in a search query, would you like Google to ask you which parts of the Internet you’d like the results to come from?
• Last but not least, putting things in folders requires constant action. For example, I receive in email about Allurent (one of my companies). Say, I’d have to put it in the Allurent folder. I reply. A response comes to my reply. I need to put that in the Allurent folder also. And so on.

The solution is to take a page out of Gmail’s book and use categories/labels/tags and the absolute minimum number of folders (for me it’s ultimately one as I’ve adopted Inbox Zero). There is no single hierarchy. Search/browsing works well. And I don’t need to always take an explicit action because categories propagate out with email messages. Well, at least they used to.

Enter Outlook 2007 where the good folks at Microsoft decided that showing the rest of the world what categories you apply to your emails is a bad idea. Not sure about you, but I tend you use fairly benign category names and wouldn’t mind sharing them with the world with my outgoing email, provided that I get them back with any responses and therefore don’t have take any extra effort to categorize (pun intended) incoming emails. For a discussion of how Outlook 2007 differs from Outlook 2003 in these respects, take a look here.

For those of you who, like me,  want categories to (a) go out with sent messages and (b) be accepted with received messages, you have to do the following:

• By default, Outlook 2007 installs and enables a rule to eliminate incoming categories.  If you don’t want Outlook to strip out incoming categories, rule “Clear categories on mail (recommended)” can be disabled via Tools > Rules and Alerts.  This will enable Outlook 2007 users to see the category assignments made by POP users on Outlook 2003 or earlier (and I assume other non-Outlook email clients as well). (quoted from the article linked above)
• You need to modify a couple of registry settings. In HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Preferences, create (they probably won’t already exist) DWORD values SendPersonalCategories and AcceptCategories and set them to 1. I got this tip from Microsoft. You can download a registry file to make this fix from here.

There are two other annoyances with how Outlook 2007 handles categories. First, it doesn’t offer an option to set categories on outgoing emails (since they decided it was a bad idea in the first place). Second, the interface for picking categories is not designed for dealing with hundreds of categories. I developed a small module (technically, a form region–see pic below) that makes it easy to type categories during sending, reading and previewing of messages and tasks. It makes it really easy to work with folksonomies inside your mail system.

Here is how you can use it:

• Download form-regions.zip.
• Extract it to %userprofile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
• There are three files there. Double click categories.reg to load the appropriate registry settings.
• Restart Outlook.
• You can modify categories.xml file and set the showCompose, showRead and showPreview elements to 0 or 1 depending on where you want to see the categories form region.

Word of warning: this has only been tested on my system. However, there is absolutely no code–form regions are built using just configuration information.

Now I have to go back and deal with all the email that has accumulated while I built the form region and wrote this post.

As storage gets cheaper, enterprises small and large accumulate more and more information. Finding the right information at the right time is becoming harder and harder. Information comes from many sources: email, IM, the Web and intranets, employee’s desktops, enterprise systems. Security and compliance are not easy to achieve in this environment. So, what’s the industry doing about this?

Let’s look at some data.

• Symantec bought
  • Veritas (July 2005), which bought KVS, an email archiving and discovery company. (Aug 2004) KVS’s technology has been packaged into managed service offerings since 2004 by companies such as AT&T.
  • IMLogic, an IM security/archiving company (Jan 2006)
• Iron Mountain, once a boxes-on-trucks-and-in-caves company, bought online backup player Connected (Oct 2004), put its leadership team in charge of Iron Mountain Digital and set out to create the most scalable outsourced digital content discovery and archiving platform.
• Autonomy, one of the key players in enterprise search, bought discovery and archiving vendor Zantaz last week for $375M, which in turn had bought hosted e-discovery vendor Steelpoint. (Aug 2004)
• Yesterday Google announced it will acquire Postini for $625M, a hosted content discovery, security and archiving player.
• Even Tumbleweed wants to buy a hosted email archiving vendor.

Some trends emerge:

• Outsourcing of content archiving, which often means
• Outsourcing of e-discovery, which is why we see
• Search players buying hosted content archiving companies

To move content off-site, hosted backup/archiving providers need to tap into all key enterprise information flows (network, email, storage, desktop, etc.). This allows them to offer value-added services such as content security (DRM, IP theft protection, etc.) as well as implement a number of compliance-related policies. In addition, once content leaves the enterprise, there are many possibilities for additional services around e-discovery, collaboration, data mining, etc. That’s why everybody wants the enterprises’ data.

The biggest challenge to implementing this well is tapping corporate desktops–where most of compliance-related information (emails, docs & spreadsheets, IMs) ultimately originates. (Integrating with servers is easy + there are far fewer of them.) For a solution to truly work and be deployable to employees without requiring costly training and change in work habits it will have to be seamless–practically invisible and non-disruptive to the unstructured workflows of knowledge workers. There are two easy ways to do this. You can build these capabilities inside the office productivity software. Microsoft and the folks at Open Office have the lead there. You can host the productivity apps, which is Google’s long-term strategy for the enterprise. It is a very powerful idea, indeed. Right now, I know of only one solution on the market that can tap into MS Office & Sharepoint environments without disrupting employees. It comes from Meridio, a Belfast-based company I’m on the board of.

Some interesting questions:

• Does IBM have this covered through it’s outsourcing offerings and a myriad of ECM technologies?
• When will Microsoft get into the hosted content services business in a big way? Nearly 1/2 of KVS’s business was on the MS platform…
• How will EMC respond? They have pushed to increase their service offerings (bought Internosis in 2006) and have been integrating search deeper into their storage and ECM product lines. Perhaps they’ll buy Autonomy?
• Will FAST stay focused on search alone?

eWeek has a good analysis of office apps that links into a deeper look at Office 2007 Beta 2. Having installed and played with Beta 2 on a Vista machine I do agree that MS will have a long upgrade cycle. Most people that should use Office, certainly in the US, already have it. Therefore, given the high cost, Office upgrades will likely be tied to PC upgrades. Further, I expect Enterprise Agreement (EA) customers to push back on Office upgrades due to the potential helpdesk hit. The new user experience is neat but there are many incompatibilities with Office 2003, which will be a problem. I’ve used Word since v3.0 on DOS and it took me 15+ seconds to figure out how to zoom a page. Not good.

Does this mean that non-MS alternatives have an opportunity to increase market share? Not in a meaningful way in the US due to market saturation. Rest of the world is a different story–too complex to unravel in this post. I’m especially negative on Web-based tools as replacements for MS Office in enterprises for the following reasons:

• Quality: the ones I’ve used tend to be buggy.
• Reliability: because of the way browser processes are handled by the OS, when your browser crashes you can loose your work.
• Connectivity: AJAX apps haven’t figured out how to deal with occasionally-connected scenarios. It is bizzarre how long it has taken the world to learn from Lotus Notes (and Groove) about the power of auto-synchronization and the ability to work on- and off-line. This is especially important for business travellers.
• Security: to handle loosely-connected scenarios you need local storage, which requires appropriate handling of security. This gives an edge to Flash-based applications (compared to DHTML apps), both of which use AJAX to communicate with servers. Flash has some local storage capabilities. You can do local storage directly from the browser scripts but you need applets or ActiveX controls that will generate security pop-ups, etc. (What’s old is new. I built an app like that back in 1998 using WDDX and the MS file access ActiveX controls.)

Strangely enough, the criteria above suggest that MS has a chance to solve the on-demand office app problem better than anyone else. They have Ray Ozzie of Notes & Groove fame. They have control of the OS & browser, which would allow them to solve the connectivity & security issues transparently.

I’m all for simpler, on-demand productivity apps for the home but the enterprise will go with MS for a while longer.