Simon Barratt

If you could re-engineer your corporate´s email service what would you do?

The biggest collaborative tool in use today is email.  Often misused and always abused!

If you had to re-engineer this environment from the ground up, is there something you would do differently from the way you currently have it implemented?

Would you look to reduce the number of servers to the bare minimum and centralise them?  Or perhaps look to implement many appliance grade mail servers across your organisation?  Would you try to encourage better email behaviour by limiting email in some fashion, requiring the use of other collaborative tools to house larger or more important forms of communication?

These are some of the discussions that we are having at the moment in FMC.  We are keen to reduce the number of servers, but doing so adds a lot more complexity in areas that were otherwise simple.  Backup/Restore and disaster recovery (or Business Continuity Planning as some like to call it now!) suddenly becomes a very important topic, due, in part, to the amount of time it takes to back up large amounts of email in a central location.

In our discussions so far, we really have been focusing on replacing like with like.  With Exchange and Outlook there is only so much you can do, but with a green field (almost) to do it in, is there something new/cool to try?

I believe adding an RSS reader within Outlook make senses, but only one that allows corporate IT to maintain some feeds on everyone's behalf, whilst allowing users to add their own private feeds too.  I am promoting the addition of RSS streams to more and more applications, and want to make sure they are exposed easily.  I have been experimenting with this idea in Notes, thanks to Steve's RSS Feed Reader and have found it to be a great start.



Anyone else got any ideas?