Sometimes when you show someone a piece of technology they’ve never seen before, it can make you feel like a magician. You see that same mix of surprise and delight that you imagine a magician gets when his assistant’s legs start to move in a box 10 feet from her torso. It’s a nice feeling and the reason a lot of us rush out to buy the latest smartphone or gadget. But consumer products aren’t the only technologies that can do magic tricks.
Email archive technology performs it’s own magic trick too. A magic trick, as defined by the 2006 movie The Prestige, has three main acts. The pledge, the turn and the prestige define the three stages of a good trick. Email archive technology has the same three stages.
The Pledge
“The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man.”
The pledge in email archiving is email. It’s the very definition of ordinary. It’s the most common form of business communication in the world. Around 150 billion emails are sent every day. It’s also become an important business document, regularly used throughout the world for day-to-day instruction and decision-making.
The Turn
“The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary.”
What email archive technology does with email is file it away in a secure, searchable location. It takes the email history of a company, that would normally take anything from a few hours to a couple of weeks to audit, and it turns it into a single archive. Ordinary email systems can be a nightmare to navigate and are rarely in compliance. The new archive is in full regulatory compliance and searchable in minutes. Email archive technology takes all the time and work that email histories can create, and makes it disappear.
The Prestige
“But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the Prestige.”
As the quote says, it’s not enough to just make that time disappear. So many new technologies just replace old tasks with shiny new ones. The prestige in email archive technology is the time it gives you back. Email archives can be searched with ease, by anyone. With email archive technology you don’t need an IT expert to find an old email, or perform an email audit. You just need to search the archive, which involves typing in a keyword and hitting search.
Email archive technology doesn’t pull rabbits from hats. It doesn’t make a song and dance out of simplified tasks. As magic tricks go, it’s a quiet one. But when you see how much time it gives back to your business, it does feel like magic.
