The Fully Loaded Cost of Corporate Email and How to Reduce these Costs
An IT executive in a large Notes shop referred me to this comprehensive Forrester study from Ted Schadler about the real cost of corporate email. Ted and his team surveyed 53 IT executives in charge of corporate emails and concluded that the fully loaded costs for corporate email is as high as $480 per user per year for a mobile executive, or $334 per year for an information worker in a company with 15,000 users.
This means that an enterprise with 15,000 employees pays more than $5M per year just to get email, calendaring, and mobile access for 10% of its workforce. That's a lot of money!
So how can we reduce costs?
Well, storage and archiving costs account for 37% of the total email costs for an information worker, and email attachments dramatically inflate the total size of the email database. If you reduce the size of the email database, you also reduce the total cost for email: send links rather than attachments!
Lotus Quickr actually enables automatic replacement of attachments with links to a Quickr place and Mainsoft enables the same with Microsoft SharePoint. So a Notes user will get prompted when she sends an email with attachments, asking her if she wants the attachments to be posted on SharePoint and to be replaced with links in her outgoing email.
Central IT can even provision this replacement option by always asking the user to replace documents with links, or by replacing documents with links by default. A number of our customers recently asked us to make the drag-n-drop operation from the SharePoint sidebar to Notes email the default so that a link is dropped rather than a physical attachment. This will come in our next minor release in a couple of weeks.
So be friendly to your central IT friends, to your company budget, and to the planet - send links rather than attachments!
