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Energizing Exchange: Page 3 of 7

"People would all love to have Gmail-size [2 gigabytes per user] accounts, but disks are expensive and it slows the whole system down," Zumiez's Hudson says. "Start pushing a gig or 800-megs [per user] and it gets slow. If we raise the limits, users will hit the new limits. People need limits in their life."

Educate users
Capacity hogs aren't the only dangerous types of Exchange users.

CIOs and IT managers, need to foster a "loose lips sink ships" mentality among users if they want to keep sensitive data within their firms. "The first thing that you should do is create training to teach users their responsibilities," says Burton Group analyst Pete Lindstrom. "Email is so persistent and available that folks forget that notion of responsibility."

Lindstrom says many still perceive email as a short-lived form of communication, something which could not be farther from the truth. "You should assume that it will live forever," he says, adding that internal users should bear this in mind whenever they compose an email.

"If you're talking about legal issues, the users are the ones that will be pointed to as a 'smoking gun', particularly if they are spouting off and saying things that are inappropriate," warns the analyst.