Past and present are not that different

I have been writing this column since the beginning of 2000, first for Network World Fusion and now for Messaging Wire. In looking over a couple of columns I wrote in January 2000, I found the following results from a study we had done while I was at Creative Networks:

• We found that about two in five organizations does not have an email or document retention policy, and that one in six organizations has not implemented any policies related specifically to archiving or backing up the messaging system.

• One-quarter of email users are not able to retrieve information from the backed up or archived message store. That means that for a large percentage of users, old information in the message store is not accessible once it becomes more than a few weeks old.

• We also found that the median message store space allotted to each user is 45 megabytes.

What has changed during the past 10 years? Surprisingly, not a tremendous amount.

For example, a survey that Osterman Research conducted during late summer 2009 found that 12% of organizations do not have a policy focused on the use of email and other communications technologies, while another 2009 Osterman Research study found that more than one-quarter of organizations have not yet established any sort of email retention policy. That’s certainly better than the situation a decade ago, but not as good as it should be.

An Osterman Research study in 2009 found that for 55% of users, old email gets archived only if individual users do so themselves to a local hard disk, a file server, etc. While a larger proportion of organizations archive their email today than was the case 10 years ago, there has not been a tremendous amount of progress here either.

What has changed dramatically, however, is the amount of space allotted to users’ mailboxes. A 2009 study found that the median mailbox quota size is 200 megabytes, more than four times the size of a mailbox 10 years ago. This is due largely to the much greater use of email and attachments, more use of multimedia, etc.

In short, we have found progress in the adoption of archiving and retention policies over the past 10 years – but not quite as much as many had anticipated.