Modern business is fueled by email. It’s a necessary tool. And improper email archiving is a dangerous game. Here, I’ll remind you of some of the reasons you and your employees should archive email; and tell you how not to archive (unless, of course, your company doesn’t mind some of the legal and compliance headaches that can arise when email goes un-archived).

If you have other suggestions (dos and don’ts) for email archiving; leave a comment below.

First, let’s recap why employees should archive their email:

1. Insurance Policy: Back up email just in case a message is lost or deleted from a mailbox.

2. Clean Inbox from Clutter: Maintain productivity and save on purchasing extra email mailbox storage. Rackspace Archiving and other archiving solutions tend to have stronger and more flexible search capabilities than webmail solutions and email clients.

3.  Knowledge Transfer: Email is the most important communication for a business. Keep the data and transfer to future employees, especially helpful where employee turnover is high, for example, sales teams.

4. Employee Monitoring: Monitor employees for proactive litigation prevention and work evaluation.

5. Compliance: Email archiving tends to be a part of many industry regulations. It is important to note that Rackspace does not guarantee that archiving alone will make you compliant. Companies should consult their legal team to see if Rackspace Archiving or other archiving products fits their compliance requirements.

6. Lawsuits: Companies of all sizes are prone to lawsuits. Yes, I am even talking to the two-person small businesses out there. They can happen at any time and often involve email. Remember the Petraeus scandal?

Ways you should not archive email:

1. Personal Storage Tables (PST) Files on Local Hard Drive: This method relies on employees to save PST files to their local hard drive. This is a bad idea. PSTs are difficult to search and can easily become corrupt. There is an entire industry around this. Search “PST corruption” on search engines and over 5 million results come up.

2. PSTs to Cloud Storage Products: The current industry cloud storage products are pretty solid. But again, this requires one to first store PSTs to a local hard drive before it can be saved to a cloud storage product.

3. Relying on Hosted Providers’ Backup Policies: Many businesses believe in the myth that their hosted email providers backup their email data forever. Most hosted email providers do have backup policies but they tend to be much shorter. Customers of Rackspace email platforms have between 15 and 30 day backup depending on the email.

4. Selective Email Archiving: Many employees will archive specific emails. This usually works for them but you should think about future repercussions. First, think about how often you wish you would have saved something so you can go back to and recover. Second, what are the potential legal consequences for deleting specific emails?

5. Portable Storage: Some like to archive their email data to a separate server, DVD or thumb drive. This again presents significant downsides and risks. These devices do not come close to the redundancies that cloud archiving products like Rackspace Archiving provides. They are also prone to breaking, being stolen or lost or suffering damage in a natural disaster.

6. No Archiving: New businesses often tend to not archive their email at all. These companies are small, new and still putting together all of the pieces. This is the most pivotal time for a company, so keeping the data for knowledge transfer and litigation is necessary.

I hope this has provoked some thought around how your business archives email (or maybe how it does not archive email). Assess the risk of your current solutions and evaluate email archiving products in the market. If you are a customer of Rackspace email platforms, I hope you will include Rackspace Archiving in your evaluation. If you are not currently hosting your email with Rackspace, check us out; I think we have pretty solid email solutions for your business.

The visit started off with Graham speaking to the ‘under renovation’ Blacksburg office.  The story of Rackspace is really amazing.  It’s a story of challenges and triumph.  Rackspace did not quite start off as a customer service organization – we learned after many failings that Fanatical Support® was the right way to go.  Our company went public during the recession, yet we have grown exponentially during the worst economy since the Great Depression.

Later that day, Graham presented the keynote speech.  In it, Graham gave an inspiring and educational talk about customer service and how this economy is the right time for the members of the RBTC to reach for glory.

The evening was capped off with deserts and drinks.  Perhaps the coolest moment for me was meeting Graham Weston, I can’t begin to tell you how kind and friendly he was to me and everyone else in attendance.  He made his way around each table of Rackers and introduced himself.  I even had a couple minutes to share my Rackspace story with him. Graham Weston’s visit has helped me further understand why Rackspace is exceptional.  Watch his keynote speech below.

RBTC 2011 Fall Membership Gala – Keynote Speaker: Graham Weston, Chairman of Rackspace from Roanoke-Blacksburg Tech Council on Vimeo.

A little background on the video: After a few tough months of making improvements to Rackspace Archiving, we finally introduced Rackspace Archiving 2.0 in June. During the party to celebrate our successful launch, the Support folks needed to release some steam from the old version, so we took it out on the server box the product lived on. CNN found the video online and came to San Antonio to do a story about Rackspace culture. That’s how Rackers turn a negative into a positive! Check out our bat swinging skills.

Fanatical Support^® in All We Do

Our frontline support representatives are our stars. They truly represent what it means to be fanatical. As a result of their contagious fanaticism, Fanatical Support spreads throughout our organization. If our customers have a bad day, so do our Support Team, Operations Team, Product Team, etc. Despite Blacksburg being a 1,000 miles away from our Support team, I feel the emotions of our support team on a bad day.

Results First, Substance Over Flash

We recognized early on that we were growin – fast. A simple band-aid approach could have been implemented. However, we knew that the right approach would involve taking the hard road. This meant rebuilding much of our Archiving platform and carefully migrating customers over. Results? Substance – no flash.

Committed to Greatness

Rackspace CEO, Lanham Napier, once said, “Greatness is achieved when our customers say we are great.” What is our measurement stick? By heavily tracking our Net Promoter score, a measure of customer satisfaction, we can confirm that we are performing at or above our customers’ expectations. We’re seeing an upward move in our scores due to the recent improvements, and we continue to work toward earning and maintaining a 10 from each of our customers.

Full Disclosure and Transparency

As they say, communication is half the battle. We notified customers two days in advance that they would be moving to Version 2 and the changes being made. We then followed up with our customers after the migration to let them know that they were now on Version 2. Plus, Resellers and Enterprise customers also received special information packets to share with their users.

Passion for Our Work

This Core Value shined during this project with engineering, product, and frontline support working tirelessly to ensure that our course of action was in customers’ best interest and that everyone involved had the proper information to understand, inform, and reassure customers throughout the transition. I am especially proud of our main support subject matter expert, Chester Mann. Not only did Chester work ardulously to support our customers, but he also spoke up on behalf of the customers and the support team, and helped us to implement new processes to further improve the customer experience.

Treat Fellow Rackers Like Friends and Family

Can you tell I think very highly of our support, operations, and R&D teams for all their amazing work? Not only do I appreciate them for their passion and knowledge, but they are also my friends and family too. Every couple months, I travel to San Antonio to see them. It’s always like seeing distant family members where I can catch up with them at dinner and talk about old times. Building a product on cloud technology brings many advantages. But our real differentiator is Rackers and the Core Values that we live by. And I am proud now more than ever to be a part of this differentiator.

Read more about Rackspace Core Values on the RackerTalent site. Get more information about Rackspace Archiving online now.

Rackspace Archiving Enters the Cloud

Accommodating the rapid growth required a whole new way of thinking about software-as-a-service. While other archiving providers still run on limited servers, we rebuilt our search infrastructure and moved it onto the cloud. This allows our system to scale accordingly whether 5,000 or 100,000 users are searching their archive.

As a result, Rackspace Archiving Version 2 provides our customers a better overall experience with more stability and speed. This is absolutely groundbreaking. Wouldn’t it be nice if the highway system scaled that way to automatically create new lanes when traffic becomes congested?

What’s New in Version 2?

Not only did we rebuild much of our infrastructure with innovation, but we also added new features. We know that search is the key element of an archiving system. To make it easier for our users to find that one email out of possibly millions, we added new search features:

• Advanced Boolean Queries – Combines Boolean logic (i.e. AND, OR, NOT)
• Fuzzy Queries – Includes common misspellings and variations of search terms in results.
• Proximity Queries – Searches for terms that exist within a certain number of words of one another in a message or document.
• Advanced Date/Time Queries – Mixes date/time ranges with Boolean logic and/or wildcard capabilities to retrieve messages based on a variety of time-related criteria.

We also know that users want to quickly and confidently export their email data. Users can now export up to 15,000 messages or up to 3.5GB of data right from their archive. For users who need to export large volumes of data, we also offer a bulk export to hard drive option.

Many more new features, plus updated support materials, are available to further enhance your experience. Give Rackspace Archiving a try now. If you have questions or feedback, as the Product Manager for Rackspace Archiving, I want to hear from you! Send me an email at tom.duscheid@rackspace.com. 

We will be hosting hour long training sessions to show you ways that the main departments of your business: HR, IT, Marketing, Product, and Sales can fully utilize a SharePoint site. If you have ever been stuck wondering how to build a sustainable and useful SharePoint Site for your business then fear no more. Rackspace is partnering with the best SharePoint consulting firm in the industry to help you for FREE!

Interested? Sign up to attend this FREE 1 hour training class on any one of these dates:

Tuesday, November 2 from 3 p.m. – 4 p.m. ET
Tuesday, November 16 from 11 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET
Tuesday, November 23 from 4 p.m. – 5 p.m. ET

Interested in other SharePoint or Rackspace webinars? Click here to see our November webinar schedule.

However, as many have been eager to adopt such tools, it might be difficult to find a way to add all these new sites into your daily routine, and it might not even hit your target audience or your real-world connections.

Microsoft SharePoint is letting industries and organizations take a social media test drive of sorts without having to be fully committed to the latest social media fad. It’s like a spin in that Porsche you always wanted try. Interested in learning some of these benefits? Check out the below top 5 ways to bring social media into your business using SharePoint.

1: Customizable Social Ecosystem

SharePoint allows you to create your own social community that includes selected employees or all employees, or your outside networks including vendors, channel partners, or customers. It’s up to you. With advanced permission features you decide who gets access to work sites or even documents. You can even specify read or write access all the way down to the individual user. The IT administrator has never had this much control over an external social network.

2: Share and Collaborate Instantly

Posting pictures of that team building exercise or getting feedback on a draft of a proposal you’re working on are easy with SharePoint. With the click of a couple buttons, upload a single file or multiple files at the same time. Upload, share, and download anything from office documents to pictures. You can even receive email alerts instantly when comments are added by your teammates.

3: Every employee is a potential blogger

Want to create an internal blog to keep employees informed about upcoming benefit announcements, sales promotions or other internal announcements? Blog about it. With SharePoint, you can create a blog and decide which teams or employees have access to view it. Stay organized with categories, follow with RSS Feeds, and interact with user comments. SharePoint does everything that other blog editors can do and even allows you to directly create blog posts from Microsoft Word.

4: Write your own Wiki

Do your policies and procedures struggle to keep up with your actual business processes? Use a custom wiki to keep things up-to-date by letting the subject matter experts in your business continually refine the best practices for accomplishing a particular task. With a single click you have the opportunity to create a new wiki that can include tables, pictures, and links to other wiki pages. Imagine the extensive instruction guide or encyclopedia of knowledge that you can create with SharePoint wiki.

5: Meet and Talk!

SharePoint gives you the flexibility to organize contacts for the entire company or by departments or projects. You can even create custom discussion boards and deploy simple surveys. SharePoint is flexible enough to adapt to the needs of your team and your business.

At Rackspace we maintain SharePoint environments for thousands of customers. By hosting SharePoint with Rackspace, companies are able to get all the SharePoint benefits without the hassle of managing and maintaining servers in one cost effective approach. And anyone with a Rackspace Email account can test drive Microsoft SharePoint with 250MB of storage for free. Most importantly, all of this is backed by our Fanatical Support.

Want to learn more about SharePoint and its use cases? Check out our Virtual SharePoint Summit taking place on Tuesday, September 21, 2010 from 10 a.m. – 2 p.m. CT. More information can be found here: http://www.rackspace.com/apps/sharepoint_summit/.

Calling all SharePoint customers, and everyone interested in learning more about Microsoft SharePoint. Please join us for . . .

Virtual SharePoint Summit 2010
September 21, 2010
10 AM – 2 PM (CDT)

Rackspace has lined up SharePoint experts from across the industry for this jam-packed, all-day summit. We will cover topics such as:

• Using SharePoint in a collaborative and fast-changing world
• Overcoming communication and collaboration challenges
• Building an effective team site
• Enhancing your existing SharePoint sites

You can attend the entire all-day summit, or just the specific presentations you’re interested in. Please mark your calendars and help us spread the word!

For complete information, check out our Virtual SharePoint Summit site.  

Starting in August, and continuing for six months, we’ll gather feedback from our CAB 4.0 participants—via surveys, interviews, and internal beta testing—and then use that feedback to help improve our products and services.

The past session was a huge success. Thanks to CAB feedback, we completely redirected a major initiative. (Many thanks to our CAB 3.0 participants!)

Are you an Enterprise customer or Reseller interested in joining us for CAB 4.0? My name is Tom DuScheid and you can email me at Tom.Duscheid [at] rackspace.com to join this upcoming six-month CAB session.

Can’t join CAB, but still want to make an impact? Send us your ideas, suggestions, and comments any time via our feedback form.

During each six-month session, we select 30 members–from businesses of various sizes and from various industries–who advise us on how to improve our products. We gather their feedback via surveys, interviews, and internal beta testing, and then we use their feedback to help improve our products and services.

Any time you have ideas for us, we encourage you to send us a comment via our feedback form, or submit an idea to Idea Central. But if you’d like to work closely with our development team and help make an impact on our products, we’d love to have you join us for CAB 3.0.

Interested? My name is Tom DuScheid and you can email me at Tom.Duscheid [at] rackspace.com to join this upcoming six-month CAB session.