This is a great question and legitimate concern.
Just about everyone in business these days uses email.
Email is a communication system, yet it contains valuable information.
Unfortunately, due to it's design, it's become a popular file storage system as well.
Attachments are popular amongst users and so email has incorrectly been adopted as a file repository.
Email systems happily duplicate your attachments each time you send one and then a duplicate is made in the recipient's email. When they save the file to their computer, another duplicate is made. Grossly inefficient as far as space and file organization is concerned.
If you are using an exchange server with Outlook or other client-side email, searching is tedius and storrage space is very scarce.
So, What do you do to make sure knowledge and information does not die in email inboxes in your organization?
- Set your organization up with google apps mail and google docs.
- Get your users to Archive all email correspondence in stead of deleting it. Google Apps has 7+ Gigs of storage per user. There really is no need to delete emails.
- Train you users on the benefits of using google docs as a document storage and collaboration system in the cloud.
- Train your users to send LINKS to documents in google docs instead of attachments. Teach them how to share a document and send people a link to it. Eliminate attachements as much as you can this way.
- Get your users to make documents from important emails (google labs feature in gmail). Make them share the docs with the entire domain if relevant.
- Get your users excited about storing information in google docs. Show them how several people can view and edit the SAME document at the same time. Show them how cool a google spreadsheet is by pulling live stock quotes into a worksheet or querying a webpage for the contents of a data table. Get them to understand these are live documents with full security and version control. Most importantly, copies are never needed -just a link to the document.
- Train your users to search google mail for valuable information. Have them turn on the Labs feature to search mail and Docs simultaneously for the information they need. Google is in the search business. Searching your email is close to instantanious in google apps.
- Worth repeating, get your users to stop deleting email. Keep it all. Make the Archive it instead. Archiving removes it from the inbox but it is still searchable.
- Turn on the labs feature "send and archive" to turn the send button into a button that sends and archives message threads or "conversations" as they are organized in gmail. This will help get users into the habit of keeping your company's precious information.
