Responsibility of Small Business Owners
Are you trying to run your small to medium sized business, but still learning about things like hosted email options and data storage backup? Have you sometimes wondered what does archiving an email do? If technological issues have you spending too much time online trying to learn them, get the answers you need by simply calling an IT company such as Blue Oak Technology Solutions. When you own a business, especially when you’re first trying to build it, having a hosted email service is important. People know the difference in the address, as far as a dot.com versus a dot.gmail (or equivalent), and the fact that the gmail account is free, making your business look less than professional. This is not the only reason it’s a better choice to opt for hosted email service. Hosted email for small business owners also gives you things like larger inbox capacity and larger file size ability for bigger sending abilities to your employees or business partners. It offers you business capabilities otherwise impossible with free email services. Plus, if you’re a new business that happens to fall into a category that has government requirements in record keeping, you may even have professional liability issues to keep in mind, making email archiving a must.
Hosted Email VS. Free
First of all, free personal email services that can be used for smaller businesses as well are great, if you’re a sole proprietor who isn’t ever going to do a tremendous amount of online business or digital marketing, such as a freelance writer, or an independent contractor who does construction work. But if you have even more than one and less than 5 employees, and you conduct business, marketing, or both online, it would be pushing the capabilities of this type of service. Why? Storage limits and volume capabilities, in a nutshell. And that includes the archive. Not to mention DNS and spam filtering options. But let’s focus on the first 2 items: storage limits and volume capabilities. There is only so much room for storage, with a free service, and that includes incoming messages. So if you get a decent amount of incoming mail and don’t always check it every day, especially, you’re going to run out of space quickly. As for volume capability, what if you decide to run an email ad campaign? Different marketing strategies are going to have a huge impact on the volume of email you both receive as well as send, so hosted email is better for these reasons. Plus, there are additional benefits and tools for small businesses that come with hosted email service, that vary with the providers. So compare deals and benefits when you choose!
Archiving VS. Deleting
OK, so you see the wisdom of hosted email, especially since the cost is also minimal. Let’s move on to archiving, and why it’s so important. Until you become a business owner (most of your adult life, anyway), whenever you’ve visited the inbox of your email address and checked your individual emails, you either decide to delete your old messages and ones you don’t care about, and save certain other ones. But at least nowadays, there’s another option: archiving. Depending on what service you use, even if you never choose to archive something, it is set to automatically archive messages over a certain amount of time, and eventually to “delete forever”. It’s usually a good thing, and does come in handy now and then, especially if you can figure out how to retrieve one! But as a business owner, suddenly it can become paramount, especially in cases where there is a dispute over something. Now, you know you have offered yourself up to be totally responsible for an entire business! It is a daunting feeling, especially if you lack even the least bit of confidence. But, it is also simply a harsh reality of your chosen life. As the saying goes; if you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. So, here you are – what’s it going to be?
Creating Defaults: The Archive Records
Knowing and accepting this monumental responsibility is a great decision, as long as you’re up to it. Assuming you understand all of this, you have to start planning for risk factors in order to be on top of – and even ahead of – your game. What does this mean, exactly? It means not only keeping a record of everything, but organizing your records, as well. This will enable you to have an effective as well as efficient system. With email archiving, that basically means “setting defaults”, which will enable you on a day-to-day basis to simply push the “archive” button when necessary – which is only if you forget to, before the program automatically asks after a certain amount of definable (another default you can set) time. Organize your email archive by date and also by topics. You can make up your own general topics such as “billing: payable” or “customer requests”, and then have them alphabetized. If you are a business owner with any measure of success, you should be able to see the wisdom of this.
In Addition
In addition, if you should ever have a dispute that threatens legal action, which happens literally every day, the email archive records – and the efficiency of your being able to access them – will be of key importance. There are over 100 million court cases for liability filed against small businesses every year, and it is estimated that well over half of all small businesses will be sued at least once. Protect yourself from this risk with email archiving, and always have the records to back up your claims. At Blue Oak Technology Solutions, they offer email hosting, encryption and archiving, as well as have many other technological solutions for small to medium sized businesses, at one low monthly rate. They also offer data backup storage management, giving your business another layer of protection and necessary storage in another remote location. These are just 2 of the many different options they have, so if you are a small business owner today, check them out. Also check out our post on what is virtualization.
