Sue Hildreth

The hospital relies on e-mail to transmit patient test results to doctors, coordinate the schedules of residents and staff, and send intensive-care unit alerts to the pagers of physicians and nurses. Physicians, residents and others use e-mail to collaborate.

Not every activity needs to be conducted via e-mail. Here are three complementary technologies that may be better suited for your employees

For many organizations, deciding what types of e-mail to save and for how long are the chief challenges in implementing archiving. Even laws that mandate e-mail retention are often not clear on what needs to be saved and what does not.

Robb Chapman, an IT specialist at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, discovered how complicated the choice of a collaboration tool can be when he became involved in the CDC's effort to purchase software that would let researchers work more effectively with universities and state health agencies. The options proved so numerous that the agency hired an outside consultant to sort through all the candidates -- an effort that took six months.

Enterprise content management software is designed to keep track of documents and records that are stored in a variety of locations and formats throughout a company. Interest in these systems has intensified as IT managers feel increased pressure both from their own executives and from regulatory agencies to carefully track and consolidate all of the organization

In 1995, the American Hospital Association launched a Web site