Compliance and Internal Policies

These demands add even more pressure to mail administrators and compliance officers to make sure every aspect of the email is properly set. Usually compliance issues mainly impact disclaimers but here are a couple that can affect subject lines.

Compliance requirements such as ITAR

FTC compliance requirements for some industries such as the wine industry require that the subject line contain the word "Advertisement" for all marketing email campaigns.
For internal policies, there are as many reasons as you can think up yourself for a subject line to be modified. Some requirements that I have seen are:

- Emails going to certain clients
- Emails from a specific department to another department
- Emails from a specific department to employees
- Emails from a specific application

Dangers of a Notes agent solution

To handle the subject line changes, some companies have created internal solutions by modifying the mail template. The solution works but we all know that modifying the mail template also creates problems when it's time to upgrade to a new version of Notes. Another issue with this type of solution is that modifying the mail template does not handle emails sent from CRM systems or other customer service applications that send information directly to the customer.

Another issue with an internal solution is that an agent is used. No problem if you have a few hundred users generally. But for an organization with thousands, an agent could slow down your mail services. Feature creep will inevitably take hold and make the agents slower as more and more modifications requests arise.

To solve this requirement, a solution needs to handle the subject line modification at the server to maintain mail delivery service. The solution also needs to work with the address book, CRM and your other applications to make sure that all emails leaving the company are evaluated and the subject line modified if necessary.

Having a server based solution keeps the resource requirement lower, the processing on the emails faster and eliminates the need for yet another agent for the server to process.

In addition to subject lines modifying, you may also be faced with disclaimer compliance requirements that will take more than the standard Domino policy can handle. These two requirements have really become important and a solid and flexible solution should be implemented for any organization facing these needs.

About the author - Joe Sharmer is a senior level Lotus Notes administrator/Architect with over 16 years experience in the Notes industry. Recent assignments include a rollout of Quickr to 20,000 users. He has certificates for the Harvard Leadership Development Program and Six Sigma Brown Belt. You can reach him at Joe@NotesCode.com