Hot embers burned in my manager’s eyes and the users were a hotbed of discontent as I struggled to extinguish the fires that had torched our messaging system. With perspiration on my brow and a resolve to protect the assets of the company and myself, I thought, could Hades ever be this hot?
Are you a GroupWise administrator or a firefighter? Most of us have had to fight fires with our e-mail systems at one point or another. However, being able to prevent those fires when possible and when you can’t prevent a problem say to your users "Thank you, we are aware of the problem and are currently working to resolve it" should be the goal of every administrator.
This article reviews various techniques for managing Group-Wise, and helps you try to get out of reactive management mode.
E-mail policies
One of the best management tools an administrator can have is an effective e-mail usage policy. E-mail policies should not only govern users' rights and conduct with respect to the e-mail system but they should also define responsibilities. E-mail by its very nature is a store-and-forward delivery technology where one mail server hands off messages to another. Once the message has been received by the recipient's mail server, delivery of that message to the actual recipient is not the responsibility of the sender's e-mail administrator.
TIP: It might not be popular to have a statement such as "E-mail is a non-guaranteed delivery system. It is the sender's responsibility to ensure that the recipient receives the message" in one's e-mail policy. However, it can save hours of chasing down non-deliveries and ensure that critical business and time-sensitive information is not entrusted to the system and the administrator.
Other examples of policies include restricting message sizes, retention, and archiving, as well
as something as simple as automatic trash de-letion can go a long way toward making the system more stable and easier to manage.