Business Email - Step 3: Email Requirements

Over the last few weeks we have covered in our Business Email Series: Hosting Email, and Which Email? This week we take a look at creating your email system requirement list. A breakdown of everything you may need now or in future. Breaking it down onto a list of requirements better prepares you for what are your immediate needs and gives you good control with anticipated growth requirements.

Begin identifying requirements by:

1. Auditing your system for current usage requirements
2. Polling current users for feedback on the current system
3. Review current email regulations in your country, or region to better protect your email rights

As you complete these steps, here are several tips that will help you along the way.

Talk to the right people: A person on the field, compared to an in-house employee might have a very different idea to what and how email should be efficient or useful. That is why it is important to gather information from a wide array of individuals with different backgrounds, experiences, and expertise to gather insight that would generally give everyone a good system to use.

(Having a tough time with internal surveys? Consider using Survey Monkeys to ease up the process of asking a large audience questions that you need answers to.)

Gather and analyze relevant data: Determining logs, failures, crash reports, and system outages to better improve your current systems, to meet the growing demands of your company will better improve your email response service team's ability to respond to an inquiry. Finding problems and solving it will prove to be vital minutes in revenue and productivity time earned.

Security: As covered before, advantages and disadvantages of free email vs hosted email, security is a major concern. Obvious security protocols are great, but when it comes to a greater need of security emails should be kept only for the eyes of the intended recipient. Ultimately it saves you greater hassle, and potentially large sums of money!

Tell us what you think:

1. Does breaking down what you need into a compiled requirements list help?
2. What other advice would you add to help other readers?

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Posted in: Business Email, Email Hosting, EVERWORKS, how to, Internet, Internet Hosting, Tips