The WAT Intranet Suite

Email is probably the single most important business tool to come out of the Internet Boom. Using email is necessary to conduct business in today’s world. Consider the fact that almost no one in India had email addresses when I moved back from the US in 1997, that my friends is a communication revolution.

But for something so important its amazing how often my clients (and friends, and relatives, and friends of friends, and friends of relatives and any combination of relatives, friends and clients you can think of) have problems with email.

Normally the reason why it isn’t working isn’t readily apparent and this leads to a lot frustration. These customers start viewing email as some sort of black magic that works when the email gods are happy and doesn’t when they are annoyed. So whats the solution?

There isn’t one true solution that can work for everyone. However there are a number of steps we can to take ensure email is the boon its meant to be, and not a curse.

Use your own domain: For work email use your company url. If you dont have a url get one. When I see someone from a company write to me with a gmail, yahoo, or horror of horrors a hotmail address, in my mind there is an automatic devaluing of the company. This might not be fair, but thats how it goes. Its particularly not fair because yahoo, gmail and even hotmail email services are better than what you would get from most email services provided by hosting providers. Which leads to the next point.

Use a Good Email Provider: Its often tempting for smaller companies to just get whatever email comes with the website hosting package. More often than not these aren’t very good. There are exceptions but for most companies where I have seen regular problems with email, this is the cause. And there really is no good reason for this. The email system I prefer to put in for most customers is the Google Apps for your Domain system. This provides a gmail based email infrastructure with all that signifies (blackberry support, Exchange support, Mobile clients for smart phones and dumb phones, 7 GB mail boxes and a lot more). For customer that need less than 50 accounts there is a free version. For larger companies there is a cost involved, but its cheaper than putting in Microsoft Exchange, either by installing your own Exchange Server or through the various Hosted exchange solutions available.

Email Address Conventions: Email ids should be consistent across the company.

Here are some of the common conventions:

Pick what works for your company but pick something. It looks more professional, and it allows someone to guess someones email address if they aren’t sure. This can be helpful to people trying to connect to someone in your company.

General Email Id’s: Id’s like sales, info, jobs etc are useful. However one thing I have seen is that often there isnt anyone to monitor the email on a regular basis. Someone might check it once a week or so. Thats a mistake. The reason you have a general email id is because the person writing doesn’t know the person to contact in the organization. To not have the email be processed swiftly could mean the loss of a big sale, or missing a critical governmental notification (I’ve seen both of these things happen).

Communication Guidelines: Its important that guidelines are established for using email. People using Company email must understand that they are representing the company when they do so. Things like abusive language or sms language (y ur nt wrkng?) should be very strongly discouraged. Setting out some basic policies and making sure everyone is aware of them is a good idea.

The flip side of this is that its just email. The change in the speed of communication has led to a lot more correspondence. 10 years ago, when email was still new in India, a letter was a big deal, because it was the only written communication between you and your vendor or client for days, weeks maybe even months. This made people be very very careful about what they said in correspondence. With email the volume and frequency of correspondence increases a lot and so the amount of effort that goes into each email shouldn’t be as much as it was for a letter.

There are a number of other things we can discuss when talking about how to use email in a company. In this post I’m just trying to outline some broad brushstrokes, in another post I will talk about specific things a company can do to make email more effective for them.

Webodrome Arise Technologies  have been advising small and medium Indian companies on their technology needs since 1999, and it felt like time to start putting some of that information out there.

Over the next few months I hope to cover a number of technology related topics. I plan on covering a range of topics, that I’ve put together based on the most common things I see when I talk to clients. If there are areas you would like me to cover please drop me an email on amit@weboarise.com and I will do my best to cover that as well.

The first question I need to answer is what qualifies me to give you advice on this. I have been working with Indian Companies since 1999 on their IT either developing custom solutions for them or guiding them in purchase decisions. In these 10 years we have worked with customers of all sizes, from a couple of people running one man or woman shows, to companies with thousands of employees. I don’t think anyone can say they have seen it all, but I have definitely seen a lot. Some of these problems are unique to a particular company, (a pharmaceutical manufacturer who couldn’t put additional wiring in a plant because of existing certifications that were received in the 80′s), some of these are easily manageable with a little forethought and planning(the employee who had hundreds of GBs of downloaded videos) and some of these are common missteps that many companies make(no backup process).

So what form of advice are we looking at here?

First I am going to look at things primarily from an Indian businesses point of view. Most of the websites that offer this kind of advice are focused on the global businesses, but I believe that Indian businesses, and particularly family run businesses, which is the vast majority of Indian businesses have some unique characteristics.  This presents some challenges that arent really applicable outside the Indian culture.  I’ll write about things like email systems, websites, hardware procurement, IT and communication policies, software choices and licensing. We will discuss what should be the bare minimum that an organization puts in place and when they need to move beyond those minimums whats the way to go about doing that.

Feedback is much appreciated, and if there are any particular topics you would like me to cover please dont hesitate to leave a comment or drop me an email at amit@weboarise.com.

The WAT Intranet Suite is launching soon. Watch this space, we should have an announcement soon.