Email archiving software not only helps organizations with simplifying mailbox management but also reduces email storage costs.
The last few years have seen emails become an integral and essential part of the business workflow of organizations. It has become an organizational requirement to maintain a record of emails that were part of an important information or business transaction. Most email archiving software allows the business administrator to set up retention policies that meet the industry standards. They also provide appropriate security features necessary for spam and malware blocking.
Most digital data, including images, text files, audio, and video files, are distributed and shared over the internet through websites and public broadcasting methods. These digital assets are collected and stored in a digital format. Software development company JatApp emphasizes that digital asset management software helps in the process of digital asset management i.e., capturing, cataloging, managing, and storing digital assets for further processing or development purposes.
Importance of Email Archiving Software
Emails have become an integral part of daily business communication. They help individuals and organizations in communicating all forms of business documentation which also include financial transactions and corporate legal statements. Several emails consist of important documentation related to such issues and more which may be required by the organization for operational use.
Email archiving software helps to store these emails in a nonproductive environment so that they can be fetched for reference as per enterprise requirements. They ensure that access to all archived emails is accessible to the organization in a convenient manner. This also prevents the need for having an email archiving mechanism on every single system that uses emails in the organization.
Features of a Good Email Archiving Software
The most basic expectation from any email archiving software is that it must automate the process of email archiving. There must not be a need for human intervention to manage the process of email storage. The software must automatically adhere to the enterprise’s policy of email archiving, at the same time allowing the email administrator to manage the same.
The software must account for the archived email security. It must be able to report malware and spyware in the emails being archived. It should also provide advanced security measures such as anti-spam and antivirus without requiring the aid of additional external software or hardware.
The email archiving software must also ensure the security of the data stored within the archived emails. Advanced software use encryption techniques to set high standards of security with archived emails.
Maintaining data integrity is another important feature of good email archiving software. The software must ensure that no data is lost during the process of sending emails from a mail server to an email archiving database or during the process of archiving. The emails must be stored as it is when required.
The software must allow the indexing of emails. Indexing allows easy and faster access to emails by searching using a special parameter associated with the emails.
Most email archiving software use compression techniques to reduce the size of the emails when archiving. Though the compression used for email archiving is quite insignificant in terms of data loss as the information is mostly in the form of text, the software must ensure that the data in the emails is not lost and is ready to be produced in the same format as it originally was.
Most email archiving software provides a simple mailbox management tool. This tool automatically captures and saves all emails being sent and received, and hence helps organizations with easy archiving of emails. This tool, however, must be able to integrate easily with hosted email services such as Exchange and Outlook.
Lastly, the speed of archiving and retrieval matters a lot. The process of archiving an email or retrieving one from the archive must be hassle-free and instantaneous. The software must ensure that proper indexing of emails is done while archiving them so that they can be retrieved easily and fast when required.
Advantages of Using Email Archiving Software
Out of the several advantages of using email archiving software for businesses, the most effective one is the reduction in costs for storing and processing old emails. Additional features such as anti-spam and anti-malware reduce the organization’s cost of using separate software or hardware for these services. They smooth the process of email usage by eliminating the need for separate email storage or archiving mechanism on individual computers.
What is a Digital Asset Management System
A typical digital asset management system will allow users to categorize, share and process digital assets across various content management applications. Digital assets exist in two forms. They can either be digitally formed or be formed by the digitization of analog data such as audio, video, and images. Institutions and organizations tend to give as much importance to these assets as other resources of the organization.
A digital asset management system (DAMS) provided helps these organizations organize and manage digital assets. At the very basic level, these DAMSs may use typical database management tools to store and access digital assets. An important feature of DAMSs is that they must be able to associate digital assets with related metadata which is how a digital asset is recognized and categorized.
Digital asset management systems generally perform a full cycle of asset management ranging from acquisition of the digital asset, its processing, delivery and finally archiving for further use by the organization.
Things to Remember When Choosing a Digital Asset Management Software
There are some very important questions to be answered before choosing digital asset management software for your organization. These factors help in selecting the best asset management software suiting the needs of your institution.
- The functions of the DAMS that are essentially required to be deployed
- Establish the cost-benefit ratio
- The method of implementing the digital asset management software in your organization
- The target data types that are a part of your organization’s digital assets and which will be eventually handled by the DAMS
- Deployment of a DAMS will follow a change in the software policies and procedures that previously prevailed in the organization
- The method of integration of the digital asset management software with the existing digital data management software of your organization.
- The software, hardware, and implementation costs that will be incurred on the organization
- People involved in using and establishing the digital asset management system
- The number of phases in which the complete DAMS will be implemented in the organization (it is advisable to implement DAM software in several phases)
- The support you will get from the DAM software vendor with the complete process of implementation of the software
- An estimate of the cost savings that will result from the implementation of the DAM software.
Features of a Good Digital Asset Management Software
On a large scale, digital asset management systems are the foundations of a digital media enterprise. They can help in cutting costs and establishing an automated digital data management system that can be directly incorporated with a content management system. Here are some of the features of a good digital asset management software:
- The administrating abilities to control the acquisition and management of digital assets
- Should be able to automate and control the flow of digital assets to and from the system
- Should provide facilities for linking the assets to rightful owners by correctly linking to databases
- Ability to arrange and organize digital assets to reprocess them into a variety of digital formats
- Should be very flexible with its approach to metadata linkage with digital assets
- Should include tools to administer and control the flow of digital assets within the organization
- Should allow the system administrator to manually control the various policies of digital asset management
- Should include systems to easily distribute and manage the distribution of digital assets to designated external channels
- Should comply with standards that have been established for distribution and management of assets
- Should ensure that people have access to only what they want through self-service distribution channels
- Should be cost effective i.e., the cost-benefit ratio must be in favor of the organization
Benefits of Using a Digital Asset Management Software
There are several benefits associated with implementing digital asset management software in your organization. They provide a cost-effective means of acquiring, processing, re-processing, cataloging, storing, and archiving digital assets in the organization. The importance of digital assets cannot be ignored in any organization. An automated way of administering the digital media in the organization not only helps in catalog building but also with product data management.
