Ordinarily Digital Divide is used to describe the computing gap between rich and poor. At first, it applied to hardware: the wealthy had computers; the poor did not. Later, it was applied to broadband access: urban and suburban dwellers have greater access to high-speed Internet connections than indigent and working class households. Another Digital Divide could be developing, however, and email may be the kernel of it.

More and more, email is becoming a popular whipping boy for corporate higher ups. Atos CEO, Thierry Breton, for example, grabbed headlines when he declared his company would be scrapping all internal email in favor of a system designed along the lines of Facebook and Twitter. Most email is just noise, he contends, a statement that makes me wonder if M. Breton has ever seen a Facebook or Twitter feed. Continue reading Will Email Create a New Digital Divide in Your Business?

While it’s not clear why Microsoft decided to put its annual conference for Exchange pros on the shelf 10 years ago, it’s apparent that it feels the time is right to revive the confab this year.

So far, details for the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) are sketchy, but that hasn’t prevented the Redmond gang from starting to collect “early bird” registrations at $1800 a pop. Once the early bird period expires, registration will be $2000.

The gathering itself is scheduled for September 24-26, with an outside chance it might be extended an additional day, at the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center in Orlando, Fla.

The timing of the event should intrigue Exchange watchers. A beta of the new version of the server software, Exchange 15, is expected to be released during the summer, so the official release could take place at the conference. That schedule is consistent with the scuttlebutt circulating the Web about Microsoft’s product launch schedule for this year, which will include new versions of Office and Windows. Continue reading MEC 2012: What We Know So Far

When the company brass goes hunting for places to cut capital expenditures, a common target is its Exchange servers. That’s especially true as the cult of the cloud grows in strength and numbers.

Arguments for embracing the cloud are as familiar to administrators as the words to the Lord’s Prayer are to Christians:

• Better cost predictions because you’re paying a flat rate for service based a predictable metric, such as user numbers.
• Headaches connected to upgrades, updates and service packs are passed on to the cloud service providers.

On the other side of the coin, some organizations can’t or won’t give up direct control of their email. There may be compliance issues created when trying to use cloud services. Since so much litigation these days has a litigation component, the legal department may be concerned about responding to eDiscovery orders in a timely and appropriate manner if email is under the control of a cloud services provider. Continue reading Moving Exchange to Cloud Need not Be an Operational Necessity

There are many ways to categorize how people manage email and recently Joshua Lyman aired a scheme based on how they use folders.

Lyman identified four classes of email managers:

• No Filers. They just let their inbox fill up and ignore folders entirely.
• Frequent Filers. They create elaborate folder structures and are diligent about filing messages as they arrive in their inbox.
• Spring Cleaners. They mix frequent filing with no filing. They allow messages to pile up in their inboxes, but periodically clean up their inboxes and file the messages in folders.
• Folderless Cleaners. They maintain lean inboxes by retaining all but essential messages in their inboxes and sending all others to a dump folder. Continue reading Be a Better Email Manager Through Self-Analysis

Much to-do is made about people choosing poor passwords to protect sensitive information in their care. Just this week, for example, a company that could well serve as the poster child for password worst practices paid the U.S. Federal Trade Commission US$250,000 for its security sins.

The company, RockYou, exposed the personal information of about 32 million of its customers to hackers in 2009. A subsequent study of that information revealed that the passwords chosen by those customers were so weak, a brute force attack using a dictionary containing 5000 of the most commonly used passwords could crack 1000 accounts every 17 minutes.

However, administrators can be as careless as the members of their flocks when it comes to password practices. In its annual data breach report [PDF] released earlier this month, Verizon discovered that only 42 percent of the 855 companies contributing information for the study said they do not use vendor-supplied defaults for system passwords and other security parameters. That means 58 percent of the companies use passwords that are publically available on the Internet.

Continue reading Default Passwords Pose Security Problems for Many Organizations

Here’s some good news for any administrator who has cursed spam under their breath: junk mailers appear to be on the run.

Spam volumes have been on the decline for about 18 months, according to a report released last week by IBM. Other spam watchers have estimated that spam flows have dropped from all time highs of 225 billion messages a day to 25 billion.

That’s not to say that spam volumes haven’t declined before. What’s different about this decline, though, is that it seems to be sustained.

A major contributor to those declines, in IBM’s view, has been the takedowns of some large botnets during that period, most notably Microsoft and law enforcement’s seizure of the servers supporting the Rustock botnet and McColo network. Continue reading Declining Volumes Means Spam in Transition

You may not have heard of inbox anxiety, but you may have felt it.

It’s the need to respond to all your email as quickly as possible and feeling overwhelmed when you can’t do it.

In many cases, the disorder can be irrational, as a recent study performed by OnePoll and sponsored by Microsoft suggests. That research predicted that the average inbox will receive some 14,600 emails, most of it (80 percent) headed for the junk folder.

Nevertheless, that fact isn’t calming office workers. As the study points out, one in 10 of them still suffers from inbox anxiety. Continue reading Tips for Avoiding ‘Inbox Anxiety’

For many organizations, email is their lifeblood. Because of that, most of what’s important to them lands on their email server at some point in its life span.

That’s a fact of life not lost to attorneys hell-bent on discovering electronic evidence to support a client’s claims.

When electronic discovery was in its infancy, it might have been acceptable to adopt a reactive posture toward it. That’s not the case any more.

Courts are taking a dim view of companies that appear slipshod in the treatment of their data. “We can’t find it” or “It was accidently shredded” aren’t acceptable responses to discovery requests aimed at your email archives.

Continue reading An Ounce of Retention Can Avoid a Pound of Pain in eDiscovery

A study from the Ponemon Institute, a research firm located in Traverse City, Mich., revealed recently that nearly four-fifths (78 percent) of organizations have experienced a data breach that could be attributed to a malicious or negligent employee or insider.

An even more telling finding of the study [PDF] was that more than three-quarters (76 percent) of the 709 IT and IT security professionals participating in the survey acknowledged that their data was not protected (29 percent), partially protected (43 percent) or were unsure it was protected (four percent). Continue reading Data Protection Plans can Curb Data Breaches

Complaints about email performance come with the territory of being an administrator.

Most of the time those problems can be traced to sources outside your email hardware. An improperly maintained PC starts exhibiting sluggish behavior, for example, or the network architecture starts creaking from data overload.

There are occasions, though, when a peek at your email hardware is in order is needed. You check your Exchange Server’s CPU and disk performance, as well as memory usage. Then there are event logs to review and tools to run like Best Practices Analyzer and Performance Troubleshooter.

One tool in Exchange 2010 that won’t be obvious to you, though, is the ECP Performance Console. That’s because it’s shut off by default. Since you may be interested in some of the things it can tell you about your mail system—time to authorize a user, number of cmdlets you have running and how long to process requests, to name a few—you may want to turn it on. Continue reading ECP Performance Console Overview and Why You’d Want to Use It