Easy Email Management with TechnologyOne Enterprise Content Management
Email is one of the primary forms of organisational communication today and managing, storing and sharing it throughout an organisation is increasingly becoming a priority. According to a 2004 study, worldwide email traffic increased in that year by 35 per cent to a level of 76.8 billion messages per day and corporate emails accounted for 83 per cent of the traffic.  

There’s no question that email volume is increasing; the problem is what to do about it. Email management solutions have typically been structured around the mail server, which was fine for centrally stored emails but still left emails that were downloaded to individual PCs. The reality is that most organisational email messages are locked up in personal inboxes on users’ PCs, with zero visibility as a shared resource.

TechnologyOne Enterprise Content Management (TechnologyOne ECM) presents organisations with a single management resource for multiple information sources, including email. It integrates seamlessly with all major email servers and customers, including; Microsoft’s Exchange and Outlook, IBM’s Lotus Notes and Novell’s GroupWise, and provides one-button access to a central repository where important organisational emails can be stored and linked to other information sources.

The TechnologyOne ECM Solution
While an increase in sharing organisational information is positive, unshared email into users’ private inboxes is of little use to an organisation. TechnologyOne ECM makes it simple for users to tag business-related emails and offers one-click access to rapid registration in the central repository tagging the messages to a relevant customer or project folder. Once a message is filed in the repository it is immediately available as a shared resource, meaning everyone with access to the relevant folders in the repository has access to the stored email. The sophisticated security capabilities of TechnologyOne ECM means you can enforce appropriate access to any piece of information, giving you the confidence to store even the most sensitive email messages safely and centrally.

TechnologyOne ECM is the only email management solution that offers hybrid content and context searches of its repository. Context searches include specific descriptors such as customer, project and asset, allowing you to locate information precisely and intuitively; content searches allow you to unlock the information in a message. Email information is often a mix of descriptive and specific content, and is therefore ideally suited to the ECM engine.

Email Management in Practice
However sophisticated or simple your email management solution, the fact remains that email management as a discipline is still very much a process of education. It's easy to read and reply to an email and then forget about it, a routine most of us are familiar with. However, tagging and storing email means an extra step that people need to actively learn and apply to their workflow.

Senior Information Management Advisor at Redland Council, Janice Gilby agrees, "Since getting TechnologyOne ECM we've been able to capture most of our business-related emails, which are then available as an information asset to our 650 users." The Council currently captures approximately 2,500 emails a month and the number is growing rapidly as TechnologyOne ECM continues to be implemented across the organisation.

“Managing our email has not only made us more efficient, but has greatly reduced the legal implications and risk mitigation of losing important information otherwise lost with deleted emails,” Ms Gilby said.

Whatever the culture of your organisation, email will more than likely continue to play a critical role in how people communicate. This means that managing your email will continue to be an operational priority as the shift from hardcopy to softcopy information continues.