MarkMail Webinar: Email as a Knowledge Asset

With all the focus on email as a liability (think: e-discovery) of late, it seems that many people have forgotten that email can also be an asset, a rich source of knowledge and expertise in your organization.

At Mark Logic, we believe that email is both an asset and a liability. Since there are already enough people focusing on email-as-liability, we thought we'd show what you can do with email-as-asset. Towards that end, we built the MarkMail software, implemented it as a demonstration, free web service at MarkMail.org (where it's implemented on a contentbase of ~30M open source developer list emails), and use it internally to search an archive of all emails sent to our general interest lists (e.g., technical discussions, marketing discussions).

As mentioned in previous posts, we are looking at commercializing MarkMail because we believe that other companies could benefit from internal systems similar to the one we use. Towards that end, we are holding a webinar on 4/30/09 at 11:00 AM Pacific time entitled Reducing Information Overload: Treating Email as an Asset, featuring Jonathan Spira from Basex and Mark Logic's own Bill Veiga and Kelly Stirman.

For those who've looked at and/or are considering ccBetty, I'd argue that both ccBetty and a commercialized MarkMail are trying to solve the same problem, but that we are taking an enterprise approach while ccBetty is taking a consumer one. We believe the real value lies in enterprises' email lists (and their archives) and not in helping people manage their inboxes and/or personal mail. Ergo, instead of signing up individual users and have them (remember to) "ccMark", we are trying to get organizations to (1) put "Mark" on the distribution list and then (2) load the archive of the list so anyone in the organization, subject to appropriate security constraints, can search the archive.

CMS Wire covers the upcoming webinar with a piece entitled How to Put Email in its Place, Make it Useful.