When IT gave me a new laptop and set it up for me, I was sure to mention the change in policy over emails and thought that my IT rep had understood me and set me up so that the new policy would not affect me. The policy is that, for most users of the system, all emails over 6 months old would be deleted. For the corporate vertical I happen to be in, that policy is 60 days. Originally, the policy only deleted items from the Inbox and Deleted Messages folders in Outlook. Now it includes all folders attached to the email server.
The entire time I have been using this new laptop, I thought I was safe and didn't have to worry. I was diligent about moving items out of my Inbox and saving them in the folders IT had provided. What I didn't know was that my IT rep hadn't understood what I was looking for and hadn't set me up in a way that old emails would be immune to these policies. All of these folders were still on the email server and not on my hard drive.
Yesterday I went to get an older email specific to some work I am doing and it was gone. Matter of fact, the entire folder was empty! I started looking around and many of my folders were completely empty or only had very recent emails in them. I contacted our Helpdesk and waited for IT to get back with me.
I finally managed today to escalate the issue to someone in our building and got him to come to my desk so I could show him the problem, how my Outlook was configured, and what my complaint was. He explained that how I was set up was not performing what I thought it was doing and that the corporate email policy had cleared all old emails. I asked about getting them back via a backup, and he patiently explained that only Directors and above are allowed that privilege-- any request I would make would fall on deaf ears. He then helped me to set things up so that they are the way I thought they were from the beginning, we deleted the completely useless auto-archives the application was making, we found some additional emails within an offline storage file and saved those, and I should be okay from this day forward-- except that all emails older than 60 days are gone.
It is frustrating that I went out of my way to read and, I thought, understand the corporate policy, get things set up to accommodate that policy and save things long-term, and still got screwed. The original email was extremely unclear that the folder that needed to be set up had to be in a PST (personal storage file) and on your own hard drive. I think this is because the person writing it was an IT person and not a great writer to begin with but also someone who was so close to the subject that they just assumed that everyone would know that it had to be in a PST so he skipped that vital piece of the puzzle. And, of course, when I spoke with my IT rep, I didn't know to ask about that or bring it up, so it didn't get done correctly.
Everything is correctly set up now. However, I have to contact a bunch of people to forward me work-related emails with attachments so that I can continue with some of my projects. It is frustrating and makes me look unprofessional when, what they don't know or realize is, I tried to do the right thing from the beginning. Plus, how much productivity did I lose yesterday and today trying to find out what went wrong, talking to IT, and getting them to fix me?
I suggest using a flashdrive or external hard drive--and saving everything! IT depts are a bit sensitive about employees using up their server space for what THEY think are "obsolete communication."
ReplyDeleteIf you just notify the customers that you had an equipment glitch, everyone understands that and no one is accused of being an idiot!
No offense to anyone close to you in an IT position/dept. :)
Saving everything onto a flash drive is insecure because it can be stolen and easily read by anyone. In a corporate environment, that is an IT nightmare.
ReplyDeleteThe true issue here is that your IT department doesn't know how to communicate properly. IT should always speak to their users using the lowest common denominator. Never assume your users have the same level of knowledge that you do. 95% of my users will tell me "I'm not very good with computers," which means that I am constantly explaining things on as basic a level as I can manage. While I find this frustrating sometimes, it has trained me to be more clear in my communications on company-wide issues.
What really peeves me about this occurrence is that the fault lies with IT for setting you up incorrectly, they have the means to bring back your email, but are relying on "policy" to not bother doing a restore on your mail. They could have helped you out "under the table" -- and should have because it was their fault in the first place.
I can't imagine not helping someone when I have the means to do so. I understand why that policy is in place. If it weren't, it would be someone's full-time job to restore files that people have accidentally deleted. However, I think there should be exceptions to such a blanket rule for times where the user truly needs help.