Poor “E-mail Management” is hitting firms hard

Data archiving firm GFT inboxx recently carried out a study and found that companies are not effectively managing e-mail because of poor management of staff and a lack of archiving.

The study was carried out on 260 workplace email users and found some interesting results. Over 75% of employees investigated were giving no guidance on archiving their emails or keeping important business documents. Legal guidelines are not being met and one third of employees have admitted to losing and never finding important documents.

Unnecessary strain is being put onto email servers as 41% of staff leave files attached to emails and over half of the companies do not have a limit on the size of a users inbox. End users expressed how they found archiving complex and laborious and would benefit from a single process to be put in place to do the archiving for them.

This raises questions as to whether there is a lack of infrastructure within firms regarding email policies and the storage of electronic documents. Go away today and have a think if your organisation falls into this category.

Internet Explorer 8 Version Beta 2 released

Microsoft’s new version of their web browser has been released, Internet Explorer 8. This version is feature-complete and offers usability and safety features for faster and safer web browsing. The new web browser can be found at Microsoft’s website to download.

One of the main features of the new IE8 was to speed up web access and Microsoft has spent a lot of time in their labs to see how people browse the web. IE 8 uses web services called acceleratiors which enables users to look up additional information easier. If the user presses the right mouse button a menu appears allowing users to find directions to a shop or translation services. The user friendly appeal of IE8 should see it being widely used throughout the computing world.

Realising the benefits of Virtualisation

In recent years IT departments have been pressured into cutting costs but at the same time delivering a faster and more efficient service. How is this possible? I hear you ask. Virtualisation. Their very nature means that they are simple to deploy and can be done so without anyone noticing, unlike the physical presence of a server.

It is therefore important to ensure that there is not a mis-management as managers don’t realise the full implications of virtualisation. A strategic decision should be taken to ensure managers know the full benefits of virtualisation and the impact it will have on their IT department otherwise an organisations capability could collapse if the correct strategy is not put in place.

If you’re thinking of going virtual and want to ensure you don’t negatively effect the organisations capability give BACK a call.

Olympic success puts strain on Bandwidth

The great success at the olympics for the GB team has hit the bandwidth for business-to-business applications as employees surf the internet to find the latest results and news says ScanSafe.

The number of visits to Olympic news sites increased by as much as 8 times as Britain became more successful at the games.

Those companies that did not block access to employees looking at Olympic news could not have anticipated the great success of the team. On average employees were spending 16 minutes a day checking updates about the olympic games. Businesses networks were a lot slower as employees kept up-to-date with all of the action. In turn this swallowed up a great deal of bandwidth leading to the problems. Businesses will be pleased that the games are all over and that the event only happens every 4 years.

The internet is a crucial part of any company

I thought to start the week I would talk about an internet problem that I suffered from last week which showed me how the internet is an important part in any organisation. Throughout the week I found that the internet was either not working at all or if it would work was extremely slow. This brought great frustration to myself and other colleagues around as work was taking a lot longer than usual because of the poor internet service. I was unable to check any emails or carry out important internet research. It dawned on me how people rely so heavily on the internet but you only realise this great dependency when the service is not available.

Thankfully a new week has brought a new internet service and I can finally use the internet once again. I don’t think I will take such an important service for granted anymore and look forward to being able to carry out my work with the use of the internet this week.