One Tale of Woe, a Two-Part Series

Posted by: John A. Byrne on October 29

BusinessWeek reader Rom Mattesich posted a story idea on this blog to alert us, and his fellow readers, to an issue that was hindering his family-run business. Rom, a retired telecom engineer, helps run his wife’s general contracting business, Avant Construction. Avant has withstood the downturn in South Florida’s real estate/construction business through cost-cutting measures that included jettisoning its website to, as Rom puts it, “hitch a ride” on Microsoft’s Office Live, Small Business.

As Rom and his wife discovered, moving their company’s website and employee email accounts to a free, Web-based service can have a downside. Some business email addresses that were accidentally deleted couldn’t be restored for 130 days as a security measure, even though they own the email addresses’ domain name. “This is likely to be the case of many other small businesses,” he told us. “The loss of our main emails is really hurting my business. We need to fully control the addition/deletion of email accounts.”

His situation inspired BW senior technology writer Arik Hesseldahl to write a broader story, Web-Based E-Mail: Businesses Beware. A follow-up story by our senior tech writer Olga Kharif, Perils of the Mobile Cloud, dove deeper into the potential hazards of storing personal and business data with online services.

While we couldn’t restore Avant’s missing email accounts, Rom says it was a lesson learned the hard way. At least, he reports, “Business is beginning to brighten up, but it has been a rough couple of years.” Best of luck, Rom, and thanks for helping us alert other readers whose businesses may take an unintended wild ride on the Web.