Eliminating email risk with self-review

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

I have covered the people-side of the email risk equation in posts about a Miranda Warning for Email and a recent Seattle Times article about thinking before you send. Even today via Fortune there is a story on how E-mail may be hazardous to your career.

To illustrate what I mean by self-review, I am attaching what our SenderConfirm product provides the sender of an email when a policy is triggered. It functions like spell-check – if an email triggers on a pre-defined set of rules, the message is held and the sender engaged to help clarify.

Senderconfirm_example






Call it a moment of reflection.

Yes, this is a pretty shameless plug for a MessageGate product, but it was designed based on what the market told us and the workplace realities of email dependence.

There is no one technology solution that will magically change end-user habits overnight, but an approach like SenderConfirm gets at the root cause of the problem (people’s actions) and incorporates business realities like the lack of interest in setting up an invasive/expensive monitoring infrastructure and/or disrupting the flow of email traffic.

Trust the employee to do the right thing. One thing we have seen over and over is that 99%+ of “breaches” are not the result of malicious intent…just people trying to get their jobs done and not focusing on usage rules or information safeguard policies.

Cell phone usage drops in favor of cheaper text and email

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

Interesting article from the Daily Mail in the UK (via the Drudge Report) citing a reduction in cell phone usage in favor of cheaper and silent text and email.

JD Power conducted a survey of more than 2,000 people – both contract and pre-pay customers and found the following nuggets:

Average number of calls has fallen 28.5% and 23% for pre-pay and contract customers, respectively, from last year.

Average number of texts rose from 32 a week to 46.

Not sure if agree with the notion that the decline in use is due to a phone no longer being seen as a “status symbol” but I certainly do agree that text and email are growing both based on the capabilities of the mobile devices available now and the fact that it is a less costly way to communicate than burning your voice minutes.

Coffee is for closers

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

This came up this morning here over coffee and if you have seen Glengarry Glen Ross you know why.  This is a great clip of a "sales motivation speech" although I wouldn’t quite call it supportive.

Baldwin’s character touches on lots of issues that sales and marketing deal with albeit in a less than polite way from leads to a laser-like focus on closing.  Although the delivery is a bit abrupt to say the least, the message here is on target – activity is not accomplishment and you must focus on closing business to build a company.  Plus, this gave me a reason to upload this clip…

ABC – Always Be Closing…

Making sense out of the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) & implications for electronic discovery

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

There is quite a bit of coverage and confusion about what these new rules mean to companies on a variety of levels – from retention to legal exposure. Most pertinent to us is what they mean for corporate email and how companies must prepare for the unsavory business reality of litigation.

To address this topic, we did a short webcast with our partner Onsite (who provides e-discovery services) in an attempt to have a practical discussion about what these changes mean and how to make sense out of them. Here’s the link via Law.com.

Yes, I know that webcasts can be a bit dull and this is certainly a promotional piece. However, we tried something a little different starting with an interview style Q&A discussion at the beginning and saving the standard Powerpoint sales pitch slides for the end.

Feel free to bail out as we get into our respective sales pitches, but take a few minutes to listen to the discussion on the front end. Terry, who leads consulting for Onsite, is very knowledgeable and in about four short slides boils this down pretty well.

Also, see if you can figure out where I lost my audio connection and had to scramble to dial back in…

Think before you send

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

Article in today’s Seattle Times by Marc Ramirez about email use and the implications of not thinking about what you are sending. Reinforces several of the same things from my earlier Miranda Warning for Email post.

It also profiles a new book by David Shipley of the NY Times and Will Schwalbe of Hyperion Books – Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home. Not sure if it is worth a purchase as Marc compared it to trying to make “a bottle of wine with a few choice grapes” so not the highest of praise for sure.

Good article on the recurring theme of email being both huge source of risk and essential business tool.

Something you must do when visiting Seattle

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

I am not going to re-hash all the travel advice that is out there about Seattle as there is no shortage of it, but wanted to share something that I thought you would enjoy.

A friend recommended (thanks Jessica) this quick day trip when I first moved here and I was finally able to do it yesterday with my family in town – a ferry trip to Bainbridge Island.

Bainbridge Island is a 30-40 minute ferry ride from downtown Seattle and feeds the romanticized "take a ferry to work" images that originate here.  I have several friends that live there and love it.  I’ve been on this ferry a few times as we have traveled out to the Olympic peninsula on various excursions but never stopped in town.

It’s pretty easy to do:

    1. Grab the ferry schedule here

    2. Drive on or walk on

    3. Once you get to Bainbridge Island, head to the City Center up the hilll and left at the light.

We ended up at Doc’s Marina Grill for a lunch with 6 adults and 3 children under 5 – quite a crew. They were great and accommodated our large party quickly. It sits right on the marina next to Pegasus CoffeeCafé Nola.

It’s just the right amount of time and distance to get out on the water, experience a ferry ride, and get one of the best views of the city as you come and go.
and has a great view. Another great stop is

Digital landfills

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

Was on a call this morning and one of the folks on the call referred to the mass of electronic records that companies are accumulating and are petrified to delete as a "digital landfill."

Here’s the visual that came to my mind:

Landfill_2




A big massive heap of debris (you know the ones we have all seen as we descend in an airplane to the city of the day) compacted together without rhyme or reason. Mixed in with all that garbage are some valuable items, but who wants to look for them?

Got me thinking – is there a way to apply recycling concepts to digital content?

At the very least, separating this debris before storing it off makes sense and gives you a better shot at identifying the more valuable content you and your company create on any given day.

Another chance to meet with a venture capitalist & a few pointers on how to spend your time

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

Jason Caplain from Southern Capitol Ventures has offered up a second day of his time, this time in Atlanta, for open meetings with entrepreneurs.

Looks like there was a good turn out last time around although, in the spirit of continuous improvement, he issued a few guidelines for the next gathering on May 17.

There are lots of points and posts on how to pitch a VC. A few good places to look are AsktheVC and the local Seattle Alliance of Angels has a good Powerpoint template to follow here. Take what they are telling you to heart as they are providing you a roadmap on how to be successful in fund raising.

Here’s a few pointers that I think are worthwhile:

  1. VCs have short attention spans (sorry fellas) so be brief and concise. It is more a function of their job than anything else – quickly tell them why they should care.
  2. Start with the problem you solve then describe how you solve it – describing how it works out of the gate misses the biggest piece which is why would anybody care.
  3. These are only 15 minute meetings so make them count. Plan on 5 minutes of content and use the balance of the time to field questions and be sized up by your audience. If you can’t get it across in 5 minutes, then you are not ready for this meeting.
  4. Use this as a framing statement “It does/performs/provides X and that is important because Y.” You probably know “X” inside and out, but “Y” is actually more important.
  5. No NDAs – they won’t sign them and it makes you look silly in a first meeting. You should be an expert at pitching your idea or company to anyone anywhere without fear of giving up your “secret sauce.” How else are you going to get real feedback and ensure you’re not drinking your own Kool Aid.
  6. Ideas are cheap and plentiful. Customers, trial users, and even interviews about the problem build your case and make what you are doing tangible – it is all about execution.
  7. Research the firm’s portfolio and understand current/previous investments, ones you are similar to, and even which ones may be competitive indicating they have already placed a bet on your opportunity.
  8. If you are desperate for a paycheck, this will come through loud and clear. Remember the leverage equation of these meetings – you are asking for their money but you are also selling part of your business (regardless of stage) to get it.

Be prepared to be told in a range of ways that it is not a good idea, not a big enough market, not right for the VC, or that you are not making sense. If you go around pitching your idea and at least one audience doesn’t react this way, be suspect because people may be tuning you out and/or don’t care enough to provide feedback. Counting on this happening will strengthen your resolve and put you in the right frame of mind to think through your business and be prepared for the hard questions.

Learning what your products can do from your customers

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

Funny thing about customers – they will show you how your product(s) can be used in ways you never imagined.

This is a great stage to be in as a company as our technology is finding new problems to solve and our customers are getting huge value out of our ability to solve them without having to shop for something new.

We had a recent experience where one of our customers came to us with the need to control duplicate emails before archival and wanted to use our classification product to do so.

De-duplication has long been the turf of pure storage and archival companies and is not necessarily something we considered or thought of ourselves as a solution to fix. We are not focused on single-instance storage and optimization anymore than we want to be an archiving company, but the opportunity came up to be used as a piece of the solution to this problem and we were able to address it.

We were asked if we could help eliminate duplicate emails before they entered the archive. Their problem was that in a multiple MS Exchange Journal environment, the same message could end up in multiple Journals based on the recipient list creating what was estimated to be as much as 30% duplicate emails in the long-term archive.

They are a pretty large company and that amount of duplicates translates to terabytes of extra storage not to mention the retrieval headache of seeing the same message over and over again. They looked internally at what they had that could address this and contacted us and another vendor for proposals.

Sorry for MessageGate commercial here, but we were able to get this problem under control with a pretty simple classification rule designed to detect duplicate message IDs and were able to do so with limited additional hardware cost. The other solution *could* have done this but was disqualified based on the amount of iron needed for processing.

The reason I point this out is that scalability is touted by every enterprise software company out there. No one is going to tell you they can’t scale. Where the rubber meets the road is how, operationally, you scale.  Chasing performance with server count and claiming infinite software scalability without including the associated hardware and processing costs is not a way to endear yourself to an enterprise customer or win business.

As you acquire customers and grow a business, be prepared to be shown how your product(s) can be used to solve their pressing needs in many ways you never even considered and to be able to meet these new requirements with an attractive total cost of operation.

Separating high-value from low-value email

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

I recently did a post on this topic based on a pilot I am running on my own Inbox with our classification software. Here’s an update:

    Number of days: 41 including weekends
    Number of emails: 816
    Total size: 21.9MB

Man, I get a lot of crap. Good thing I have this set up to route to specific sub-folder.

I need to do some spring cleaning and remove myself from these various lists or at least identify the ones that are of value (which very few seem to be). Also keep in mind, I am eating for two after picking up a departed co-worker’s mail.

My results are not atypical of what we have seen from our customers before they head down the road of intelligent email classification. This enormous volume of easily identified non-biz stuff not only makes its way to the Inbox but to the archive.

How big a deal is this? Go ask the person responsible for email retrieval/e-discovery how much they enjoy sorting through mountains of useless stuff like Joke of the Day, Fedex delivery alerts, or even Out of Office replies as they seek out requested emails.