Bringing Email Filing to Business - What our customers always say when they want to talk about email filing

When we first starting designing Topaz Filer, our email filing product, our plan was to satisfy a key need that we knew was common throughout professional service firms. For the most part we had the problem ourselves – we would receive emails from customers and partners and those emails generally contained information helpful to the whole team, not just the individuals involved in the discourse. Moreover we’d seen the same problem taken to the next level in professional service firms such as law firms, architects and accountants where their governing bodies mandated that they keep good records.

The intention of this paper is to discuss some of the common items that come up when we’re talking to customers about implementing an email filing system.

Creating a Shared Repository

The most common reason cited for implementing an email filing system is to create a shared repository of information. Email systems are designed for individuals to hold their private records in sealed and secure “silos” of information. Whilst everyone occasionally receives emails that are private, sensitive or otherwise not for general consumption, most individuals work within teams and information contained within the email message will typically containing information of value beyond the value to the individual. If there’s nothing stopping an individual from sharing the email the greater value to the organisation is achieved when the information is shared.

This diagram illustrates the email silo versus the shared repository:

...compared with:

Imagine that four people are working together in a team. An important client phones and says that he’s emailed through information to Bill. Bill is on holiday. The other three people do have involvement in the client and their firm’s work for that client. It’s far better to be able to access the information sent onto to Bill whilst the customer is on the phone rather than ask the customer to find it or resend it. Although Bill was the only recipient of the email, providing there is nothing in it that makes it private to Bill, there’s no reason why it cannot be filed and made available to everyone.

This arrangement does make it an absolute requirement to have strong search and retrieval functions within the store – a file that you cannot interrogate for information is of little use!

Replacing Paper Records

A very common thing we hear from customers is that the organisation is creating a mountain of paper records to track email discourse. It is incredibly common to hear of people printing out email messages and binding them in folders along with the main project documentation.

An electronic record is a very easy “win” for organisations that are maintaining paper-based records.

It’s obviously unrealistic to expect every organisation to move from a generally paper-based approach to a fully-electronic approach, but if there are aspirations to “go digital”, emails are a good starting point. Emails are always received electronically, hence there is no need to invest in technology that turns physical paper-records digital as there is with other forms of documentation. The only sea change required is to stop printing the emails out and start dragging-and-dropping them onto the file from within Microsoft Outlook.

Closing off Projects

Another advantage of an email filing system that customers talk to us about is that it allows you to file emails along with other project documentation. At some point that project will be completed, and the project documentation needs to be stored away in the archives. (Some organisations, particularly law firms, will have rules about retention periods for documentation.) Having the emails filed means that it is possible to cleanly take a set of all the email messages related to the project and store them away with the rest of the project documentation.

Security

Security is something that all customers are concerned about.

In Topaz Filer, the security layer is done at the store level. (See the architecture diagram, here.) This means that however you already setup the security to control your electronic records automatically flows into Topaz Filer. You get absolute control over who sees what.

However, whenever we talk to customers about security we always discuss a feature of Topaz Filer that allows you to setup multiple filing models for different parts of the business. This is an example of how sometimes security can provide opportunities for new ways of working rather than being a straightforward control system.

For example, you may create individual models for each operational department. These models would have a similar shape (i.e. show clients at the top-level and show projects underneath), but the data contained within would be tuned for each department. You could then create separate models for other parts of the business where information needs to be shared but is not operational. Senior management may have a cross-departmental model for anything that needs to be shared between that strata but not the general firm. IT may wish to have a model shared with the IT director and all IT staff. A similar approach could be taken with HR. This diagram illustrates:

Getting the Emails out of the Email System

Whenever we talk to members of the IT team, the number one driver for them for implementing an email filing system is to get emails out of the email system. Topaz Filer works with Microsoft Exchange, and managing large Exchange implementations is particularly problematic. Topaz Filer does two things – firstly it creates a copy of the email within a system more apt to storing documentation. Secondly, it signals to the IT department that emails have been stored. This allows for automated cleanup of users mailboxes, but done in such a way that the organisation knows that the email message is safe and secure in that other system.

Archiving vs. Filing

We’re always keen to impress upon customers the important of maintaining an email archive as well as implementing a filing system. This other paper of ours, Email Archiving and Email Filing – What’s the Difference (And Why are Both Important?) covers this in more detail.

Conclusion

This paper has taken you through some of the things that typically come up when discussing email filing systems with customers. The most common driver for implementing an email filing system is to create a shared repository of email-based data, but customers also like to use electronic email filing system to replace paper-based systems. The ability to include email emails when closing off projects is also important. In addition, customers like to be able to define multiple filing models within the organisation to increase the utility of the filing system. IT teams see Topaz Filer as a tool for reducing the size of the mailbox store. Finally, we feel it is important to help customers implement both an email archive to sit alongside the email filing system.