Mailbag: Is spamming a constitutional right?

10/02/08

My recent article on the Virginia Supreme Court's decision to turn over the state's antispam law drew some interesting comments:

Cisco buys Jabber

09/30/08

Cisco's latest acquisition is Jabber, a leading developer of enterprise-grade presence-enablement capabilities. Jabber's offerings include its Extensible Communications Platform, JabberNow (an enterprise instant messaging appliance), and instant messaging clients (a thick client for Windows, a browser-based client and mobile clients). Jabber has, for years, been a leading proponent of the XMPP protocol for presence-enabled applications.

Organizing content by context

09/25/08

As users of e-mail, desktop productivity applications, collaboration tools and other information generation and management capabilities, we create lots of content and we have lots of difficulty finding it when we need it. A key part of that difficulty is based on the fact that we use different silos of information that often maintain separate data stores, different interfaces and the like. More importantly, however, many tools are not designed to present data in the way that we need it.

Is spamming a constitutional right?

09/23/08

In 2004, Jeremy Jaynes was sentenced to nine years in prison for violating Virginia's fairly restrictive antispam law. Earlier this year, he appealed to Virginia's Supreme Court and his conviction was upheld. He appealed again and week before last his conviction was overturned. The Court ruled that the Virginia law was too broad because it did not provide an exemption for religious and political spam messages. The Court, in rendering its decision, agreed that spammers have the right to express their political or religious beliefs even if they forge their identity.

Loss of mobile access can have serious consequences

09/18/08

A study we recently completed with end users of mobile messaging devices in organizations of various sizes revealed just how critical mobile e-mail really is.

Moving beyond the e-mail paradigm

09/16/08

E-mail is a very useful tool for transmitting information and files, managing content of various types, setting up appointments, managing tasks and, in many cases, e-mail is used as a sort of real-time communications tool. Most of us use e-mail for these tasks and have come to rely on it as our primary communications medium for roughly three-quarters of the information we send during a typical workday.

The negative spiral of false-postitves identified by e-mail filters

09/11/08

A study on messaging and Web security we conducted earlier this year asked messaging-oriented decision makers about changes in their spam filter false-positive ratios over time. While we found that one-third of midsized and large organizations reported their false positive ratios were improving, 53% said they were staying the same and 14% reported they were actually getting worse.

Web-based attacks: What's the worst that could happen?

09/09/08

We are seeing a renewed level of interest in various types of external threats owing largely to some really clever techniques employed by spammers, hackers and others, who are using technologies including Flash and SQL to lure unsuspecting victims. Here are some considerations:

What do gas prices and SaaS have in common?

09/04/08

It's hard to turn on the TV, read the newspaper or talk to your neighbor without hearing about the impact of high gasoline prices. However, I believe that much of the attention paid to skyrocketing prices for gasoline has more to do with a lack of information historical context that skews our perceptions. For example, the most recent issue of Fast Company magazine calculated that the 1908 price of gasoline at 18 cents per gallon is equivalent to $3.90 per gallon today in the United States, adjusted for inflation. That means that gasoline is not overpriced today, but instead has simply caught up with the price that Americans paid 100 years ago.

PostPath acquisition is a smart move for Cisco

09/02/08

Cisco last week announced that it had purchased PostPath for $215 million. This follows the acquisition of IronPort for $830 million and WebEx for $3.2 billion, among other Cisco acquisitions, including Linksys, Pure Networks, Five Across and many others - a total of 56 since 2001.

DLP's impact on archiving

08/28/08

One of our clients, a leading provider of hosted messaging archiving services, raised an interesting point in the context of helping us to frame issues for an upcoming white paper we will be publishing shortly on DLP issues (data loss prevention or data leak protection, whichever you prefer). That issue focuses on the impact of DLP systems' modification of e-mails and other messaging content in the context of how that content is archived.

Which do you adjust: The culture or the technology?

08/26/08

A reader of a recent newsletter article disagreed with my comment about unified communications that read "perhaps the first step should be to adjust the culture to fit the technology - you're likely to be less successful if you try to use technology to change your corporate culture." His contention was that technology should not be used to try and change people or the way they work.

A sweet tool for mobility and data access

08/21/08

The Dieringer Research Group of WorldatWork estimated that in 2006 28.7 million American workers telecommuted at least one day per month, and that up to 100 million people may be doing so by 2010. The advantages of telecommuting are obvious: less employee time spent in traffic, lower gasoline consumption, fewer expenditures on office space, and the like.

Why organizations don't implement enterprise instant messaging

08/19/08

We have just wrapped up a major study of the instant messaging, real-time communications and presence market. The goal of this study is to understand how real-time communications technologies, such as instant messaging and Web conferencing, are used by midsized and North American organizations.

Unified communications and corporate culture

08/14/08

Last week, I discussed one reader's opposition to the growing use of presence and my assertion that unified communications in the future will look more like today's social networking sites. A reader of that newsletter had this to say...

How frequently do you check mobile e-mail?

08/12/08

We have just completed two surveys on mobile messaging - one with IT decision makers and the other with end users. For the North American portion of the end user survey, we asked a number of questions about how, where and when mobile e-mail is used.

Gaining insight and control in your messaging infrastructure

08/07/08

E-mail is an extraordinarily useful tool, as virtually all of us recognize. However, it can create enormous liabilities for an organization and it can cost an organization more than it should.

Resisting the move to unified communications

08/05/08

A reader offers some insightful thought on the future of unified communications, "It is cool to find out that you are at some Expo and find out that there is a new gadget from Twitter. The fact that you are now going to the restroom is more than I need to know. Yes, unified communications may become like Facebook or MySpace, but I hope not."

What will truly unified communication be like?

07/31/08

There's a lot of talk about unified communications - the integration of e-mail, voice, fax, video, presence-enabled applications like instant messaging, collaboration tools and other capabilities into a unified system that can be accessed through a single interface. But what if we look 10 years down the road and examine the characteristics of a truly unified communications system? Here are my thoughts on what that might look like.

Making a federal case out of records preservation

07/29/08

On April 15, three U.S. representatives introduced H.R. 5811, The Electronic Message Preservation Act. This Act, if passed into law, would bring up to date the parameters of the Federal Records Act and the Presidential Records Act, effectively requiring the preservation of government records in a way that current practice does not dictate. The impetus for the submission of the bill was the loss of thousands or millions of e-mails by the White House over the past several years.

How adequately are you protected against information leaks?

07/24/08

We recently conducted a survey for FaceTime Communications to determine how well organizations are protected against information leaks. Here's some of what we found:

Hosted messaging market trends

07/22/08

We have just published a new report on the hosted, software-as-a-service and managed services market for messaging services in North America. Here's some of what we found:

The need to archive e-mail is a growing concern

07/17/08

We conducted a study recently and asked decision-makers in midsized and large organizations in North America about how concerned they are on a variety of issues. We asked them whether they are more, less or equally concerned about each issue now compared to 12 months earlier.

Standardizing instant messaging protocols

07/15/08

Industries thrive when there is just one standard to adopt. E-mail has become much more pervasive because of the SMTP protocol; the video industry grew quickly because VHS won out over beta; IBM dominated the PC industry in the 1980s because only 20% or so of its architecture was proprietary; Warner's and Wal-Mart's decision to go exclusively with Blu-Ray effectively killed HD DVD, paving the way for more rapid growth of the high-def video format.

Migrating data from one system to another is not for the faint of heart

07/10/08

Migrating from one messaging server platform to another is not for the faint of heart, particularly for large organizations that store tens or hundreds of terabytes of messaging data on their servers and support thousands of users. The process is difficult, time-consuming and often results in data loss, conversion problems, lots of weekends spent by IT personnel on problem resolution and the like.

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Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.