Microsoft has announced the next version of the Outlook email client will improve email productivity by 10 percent. We don’t know all the specifics yet, but most likely the improvements will be about information triage and efficient filing. Assuming 10% is accurate, apply the math to a company with 1,000 employees and you can see how even small improvements get amplified across the enterprise.

Sonian is interested in the email efficiency theme and has some exciting ideas on how to make email work better for all users, regardless of email client. Look for more news on this topic in early 2010.

For $5 per user per month you get 35 Gb of storage, Outlook connector and a AJAXy web UI plus Ironport email security. This new offering will be an interesting platform to watch and see if Cisco can win collaboration business away from Microsoft, IBM, Novell and Google.

Sonian will provide hosted archiving services for this new platform.

Sonian is committed to provide hosted archiving support for all Novell collaboration platforms (GroupWise, Pulse, Sitescape)  and looks forward to working with Novell as Pulse evolves from alpha, to beta and shipping product.

It’s this evolution of communication habits and preferences that is exciting to watch and be part of. Whether it’s an email or a tweet, it still content that is created by a person and shared. Sometimes its personal, sometimes its business. And in a corporate setting that content needs to be preserved for a variety of reasons: compliance, posterity, storage management and best business practices. That’s where Sonian lives. Preserving this content as your “trusted digital caretaker.”

Sonian is at the nexus of three waves of change: Rising interest in cloud computing, increasing demand for software as a service, and a mandate to get the best return on IT budget investment.

The United States Department of State had their own “email storm,” resulting in this edict:

“A cable sent last week to all employees at the State Department’s Washington headquarters and overseas missions warns of unspecified “disciplinary actions” for using the “reply to all” function on e-mail with large distribution lists.”

Not a bad beginning to retraining employee behavior to think twice (or three times) before making a single click “reply to all” and pouring more gasoline on the smoldering email firestorm. While the email storm is a mild inconvenience to the employee, it’s hugely disruptive for the IT staff. Hours are wasted clearing queues and nursing the system back to health.

Email, more than any other electronic communication medium, allows free and open communication between colleagues, but this incredible power needs be to wielded carefully because it’s so abused now. Poorly written message bodies & subject lines and writing flames that would never be said in person are just a couple of the many downsides to this powerful capability.

We’re moving into the “post email world” as 2009 starts. More and more people are demanding better email technology, and as the technology is overhauled to work more efficiently, the users need to take more responsibility by using email effectively. The vendors and the users both need to have some “skin in the game.” Services like Twitter and Facebook messaging are getting more popular because email feels “so broken” right now.

In Sonian Labs we’re innovating on some really interesting concepts about email productivity. As a hosted email archiving vendor we are in an unique position to have a positive effect on the future of email. Stay tuned!

• 62% of people check work email on the weekends
• 19% choose vacation spots with access to email
• 59% check email from the bathroom (up from 53% last year)

See how email users in 20 cities fared in this survey, or check out national results by clicking on “Full Survey Findings.” For a quick glimpse, take a look at the Most Addicted Email Cities below.

In addition, employee hours spent managing (reading, sending, searching and organizing) their individual inboxes is estimated to increase from from 2.5 hours a day to 3 hours a day in the next two years.

Govtech.com provides a link to a email ROI cost estimator available from the Association for Image and Information Management (AIIM). AIIM released this “email return-on-investment (ROI) calculator tool” for CIOs and IT directors to help analyze true total cost of ownership for more accurate budgeting and planning purposes.

IT Departments continuously make difficult decisions balancing the impact of “ease of use” for the non-tech folks against the cost to maintain systems that may only marginally make their daily email usage easier. Maybe IT doesn’t have to bear this burden anymore. I think it’s time to step away from the “stubbed” mailbox.

Update: In another Technet article Microsoft recommends that third-party email archiving solutions be configured to move email content completely out of the mailbox without retaining stub files in the mailbox.

One reason for sure that folks are gravitating to Twitter is the service is easy to use and universally accessible on the web and mobile devices. This reminds me of another “service” that is on the web and mobile devices: email. But email has become compromised with spam and junk that makes the mailbox a scary place.

Twitter’s success reminds of Blackberry’s early days in financial services and how the device forever changed the way people could have access to their email and remain in contact with their colleagues via email.

Is our collective email experience becoming so much less desirable that other services like Twitter will take hold and displace the traditional inbox? To be continued…..

Archiving systems support the organization’s need for information & knowledge management, e-discovery, compliance, litigation and cost-effective storage management. Continuity systems support the organizations need to continue to send and receive email during system outages. Another common trait is that both types of systems are best delivered as a hosted service.

Chris Preimesberger of eWeek wrote a great article about the need for a more thoughtful approach to email continuity.

A new study confirms what a great many people in IT already suspected: Companies of all sizes are vulnerable to costly and damaging e-mail outages because they trust their messaging infrastructure to a single server and do not have an adequate backup and recovery plan in case of a disaster.

We hear from many IT executives that cost is a big factor in delaying or avoiding putting an archive and continuity solution in place. Sonian hopes to change all this with our new hosted messaging solutions that dramatically lower the cost for our audience/subscribers.