Hi Larry,
Not suggesting that you needed the class, only that I've been absorbing more
about email in the last year or so than most normal people would care to. :)
With regards to the vendor white papers, I know Larry and many of the
"old-timers" know, but some folks on the list don't. Many of the vendors
write very useful white papers or hire analysts or consultants to do so for
them. It's not a bad practice necessarily, but frequently they are slanted
towards their particular approach to the problem, and many of them are
blatant shills. The ones written by analysts and consultants often take the
approach of making the first half fairly neutral and the second half the
pitch. On the other hand, some of them really are good.
So how do you know which is which? Heh, that's the magic question. By way of
example, another vendor, Mimosa Systems, has a fairly different approach to
email archiving. They wrote a short book called "Email Archiving for
Dummies". No, I am not connected to them in any way, I just use this as an
example. It goes pretty light on the sales-y stuff and is pretty
informative about the very basics of email management. I don't think they
are at ARMA this year but they were at AIIM and maybe ARMA last year and
gave them away in return for a badge swipe. I point people to the Fortiva,
now Proofpoint, Policy Builder tool at http://www.policy-builder.com because
it is similarly a simple, pretty neutral tool.
When I get the email, as I did today from C2C, Mimosa, and Mirapoint, I look
at the topic to see if I think it of value, I download the white paper, and
I read it with a critical eye. If it's marketing fluff filled with buzzwords
(FRCP! SOX! G-L-B!) I toss it pretty quickly and I remember that the next
time I see the vendor pitch.
Interestingly because of the timeliness of this topic, Mimosa has a webinar
next week on "Strategies for Eliminating PST Files!" that will cover:
- The of history about PST files and how they became so popular
- How recent changes in compliance and legal discovery exposed the flaws in
PST files
- How to solve your PST problems with MimosaT NearPointT for MicrosoftR
Exchange
So I'm already on guard for the pitch. But I think the first piece will be
interesting, and if it gets too pitchy, I'm OUTTA there! It's next Thursday
- you want the details, go to their website - I ain't their bizdev guy (or
contact me offlist). :)
I guess the bottom line of this long-winded post is that the vendors do
provide value, many of them, and even the sales pitches may have nuggets you
can use such as results of studies or research that would ordinarily cost
you hundreds to thousands of dollars. In the ECM world, many vendors pay
Gartner a hefty licensing fee so they can make the Magic Quadrant reports
available for free (registration required). The caution is to not treat them
necessarily as the absolute truth nor the final word, but as one more data
point to look at.
P.S. Many of the technology vendors are starting to blog. Some of the blogs
are every bit as horrible as you would expect and are sheer exercises in
"My, look at how AWESOME we are!" Others are simply exceptional - if you are
a storage person, Chuck Hollis' EMC blog is a great example of that. For the
wikiers, Ross Mayfield (CEO of Socialtext, an enterprise wiki company)
hardly even mentions his solution but talks about a lot of the strategery
around wikis and Enterprise 2.0 more generally. I am happy to share the
blogs I follow, and believe me, in following 350 or so on any given day, I
spend zero time on blogs filled with marketingspeak. Here are some of the
email blogs I follow, many of which are written by vendors but are mostly OK
nevertheless:
http://www.archiving101.com/
http://www.deathbyemail.com/
http://weblog.johnlevine.com/
http://www.emailtide.com/
http://www.messagingnews.com/onmessage/
http://blog.soniannetworks.com/
http://blog.fortiva.com/fortivablog/
http://blog.liveoffice.com/
http://www.theemailadmin.com/
http://ferris.com/category/ferris-deliverables/ferris-research-blog/
Regards,
Jesse Wilkins
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