Ensuring electronic mail system delivery capability

Significant investments in resources have been focused on monitoring the communications links between networks to ensure connectivity. However, this attention typically focuses on communications infrastructure and not the business processes that the infrastructure was designed to facilitate. This paper examines the development and deployment of a system designed to monitor the flow of electronic mail within an organization and between it and critical external organizations. It outlines the significant issues that drove the evolution of the system from one based on a series of manual tests, to one based on a commercial off the shelf (COTS) software solution capable of automatically notifying support personnel of messaging delays. The corresponding evolution in customer expectations as system reliability improved is also examined