Danback decided to address his company's problem in early 2007 by installing an e-mail attachment appliance from Accellion.
Still an emerging category of technology products, but growing, e-mail appliances (sometimes called caching appliances or secure file transfer appliances) shift the e-mail messages with huge attachments away from your e-mail server, and into the appliance for storage.
Plugging right into the network like many other appliances, these boxes address the problems with the e-mail recipient systems too. Danback has set up the appliance so that when anyone in his firm sends a message bigger than 10MB, it kicks over automatically from his Exchange server to be routed via the Accellion appliance.
When the recipient gets the e-mail message, he doesn't get the attachment inside the message but instead clicks on a Web link to grab the document. The user can save the document to his machine's hard drive. At Integro, Danback typically sets those links to live only for 30 days. (You can adjust this time period depending on your wishes.)
Accellion boxes configured similarly to the one Danback uses cost between $5,000 and $10,000. Other vendors competing in this space include GlobalScape and Intradyn; offerings include traditional software and appliances. The products often blend some e-mail security, archiving and attachment management chores.
Of course, the old-fashioned alternative to an appliance like the one Danback set up is asking users to utilize a regular FTP server for large e-mail messages. But he rejected that option, since it would mean asking users to futz with something other than their usual e-mail client, which is in itself a barrier, Danback says. With the Accellion appliance, the user sends any message in the normal manner. Besides, Danback says, the appliance proves simple to set up and maintain.
"It's just easy. It's self-contained. It simplifies our infrastructure," Danback says.
Danback's business users like it for another reason. Because their insurance industry competitors are dealing with the same large documents and e-mail woes, anything Integro brokers can do to make their interactions with clients more seamless can only help them win business, Danback says.
"We had to find a way to differentiate ourselves from our competitors," he says.
The more attachment-heavy your company is, the more a caching appliance makes sense in terms of ROI. If you have complex discovery and compliance needs, you will want to consider using an appliance in concert with e-mail archival software.
Both of these product categories are growing, with good reason: Another recent Osterman Research study found that 59 per cent of enterprises call messaging storage growth a serious problem. And messaging storage needs are growing at a clip of about 35 per cent per year, according to Michael Osterman, principal of Osterman Research.
What's Danback's advice to other CIOs about e-mail appliances? "Look at what could go wrong with your e-mail and do something about it now. So you don't get yourself in a situation where you have proprietary or secret information in the public mail," he says.
Also, he says, be choosy about the number of non-Microsoft products you add to your Exchange/Outlook environment.
"The more features you add that are not Microsoft, the more chance you can create disruption," he says, noting that one reason he likes the Accellion box is he's had no issues other than initial setup tweaks during testing.
Eventually, Danback says, he envisions Microsoft itself buying a company like Accellion and bundling such functionality into packages for enterprise customers. "It just makes a whole lot of sense," he says.
Until then, he's sticking with his ticket out of attachment hell.
Previous page: E-mail overload
Related content:
What government users need to know about e-mail
City of Richmond cuts spam in half
European Union battles unwanted e-mail
Are your productivity windows disappearing?
Slamming spam the Industry Canada way
icon.
