News: Seems A Lot Of Folk Get Fired Over Email

By | November 24, 2011
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A new survey, the 2003 E-Mail Rules, Policies and Practices Survey from the American Management Association, Clearswift and The ePolicy Institute, reckons that 22% of employers have fired employees for violating email policy. That seems kinda harsh. What are people doing with their email? Here are some stats:

– 52% of U.S. companies monitor incoming and outgoing e-mail
– Only 19% of employers monitor internal e-mail communications among employees
– 40% of employers use software to control employees’ written e-mail content
– 14% of organizations have had employee e-mail subpoenaed by a court or regulatory body. That’s an increase of 5% over 2001, when 9% of respondents reported employee e-mail had been subpoenaed.
– 1 in 20 organizations has battled a lawsuit triggered by employee e-mail
– 76% of e-mail users have lost time in the last year due to e-mail system problems
– 35% estimate they lost only half a day, but 24% think they have lost more than two days
– The average e-mail user spends about 25% of the workday on e-mail
– 8% of e-mail users spend more than four hours (half the work day) on e-mail
– 92% of respondents receive spam mail at work
– 47% say spam constitutes more than 10% of all their e-mail
– 7% report spam represents over 50% of all e-mail received
– 75% of respondents said they were fed up with receiving surveys like this via e-mail (I made that up, but they don’t make clear how they did this survey, which involved 1,100 U.S. employers, or whether some of the surveys got mistagged as spam and trashed.)

News: PDAs in Trouble

By | November 24, 2011
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Seems like handhelds, PDAs, Palms, whatever you call them, are in trouble. PMN, a UK-based newsletter, cited new IDC figures showing a 10.7 percent drop in handheld computer shipments worldwide during Q2 2003 compared to the same period last year. This contrasts starkly with the 1150 percent rise in smartphone shipments reported by Canalys, PMN says, highlighting the rate at which the wireless communications device market is outstripping growth in non-connected handheld computers.

I can well believe that folk would prefer to have a gadget that hooks up to the Net, or at least to the phone network. But I also think people need to differentiate between a phone and other stuff, if only because most of the time they just need the phone. See this posting for more.

Software: Enter Your PC. Please.

By | November 24, 2011
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Since spam from GoToMyPC ends up in my inbox all the time, I assume that being able to access your computer at home or work from anywhere is big business. Here’s another option, fresh out of the traps: the somewhat scarily named EnterMyPC, which allows you to access and work on your computer on the fly from any Internet-connected computer anywhere.

From what I can gather it’s exactly the same as GoTo but uses Java. I wasn’t impressed by the look and feel of their website (and there are several broken links), but maybe I’m picky. It’s also run out of Panama, so there may be some legal issues there for companies.

Software: Lots of Desktops

By | November 24, 2011
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From the Hasn’t This Sort of Thing Been Around a While? Dept, please welcome ManageDesk. This program manages multiple virtual desktops from the Windows taskbar with ManageDesk. You can choose a different background for each desktop and run different applications on different desktops. ManageDesk has simple drag & drop interface that allows windows to easily be moved from one virtual desktop to another.

I’m pretty sure this kind of thing is not new, but maybe ManageDesk (not a name that slips off the tongue, guys) does it better. It could be useful if you usually have many windows open at a time, or are a messy eater, or something. Hell, I may try it.

Update: Congressman Wrestle Spammers to the Ground

By | November 24, 2011
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Here’s more on my earlier posting about congress, spam and a new survey.

Here’s the survey link. “In general our study suggests that consumers want government to provide greater protection against spammers,” commented Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of Ponemon Institute. “We hope our joint study provides insight on consumers’ concerns about the growing frequency of spam and the role government and industry should play in curtailing abuse.” The study was released at a press conference called by Senator Charles Schumer whose Stop Pornography and Abusive Marketing Act (The SPAM ACT) would create a do-not-spam list. (No really, that’s the acronym.)

“The emailing public has been at the mercy of spammers for way too long. This survey confirms that people are screaming out to be empowered with the ability to stop the constant flow of unsolicited e-mails into their in-boxes,” said Schumer. “My anti-spam bill fights spam on two fronts: It gives e-mail users the ability to put their names on a list to stop getting spammed and gives law enforcement the ability to go after those spammers that send this junk.” Hurray.