Topaz Filer

Construction

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:52:09 GMT

Today's construction projects are a complex team effort which are planned and controlled by email. CDM management and H&S issues demand emails to be saved and easily found but do you have time?

Do you find yourself having no time to file emails?
Do you send emails and never file them?
Do you wish you could find emails that other in your team have sent or received?

Well look no further!

Your team no doubt file all documents in a folder structure on a server so that they can be found easily, Topaz can read this structure and will help you file your emails into the tree. Topaz learns where emails from someone should be stored and will prompt when email to or from that person is viewed, a simple click stores the email. All saved emails are indexed by Topaz allowing you to search for any email not just your emails.

Benefits

File those emails that you know you should but use to take too long
Find any email quickly, saving emails in Outlook typically takes around 20 seconds but Topaz does it in the blink of an eye.
Reduce your email server size (Emails sent to multiple team members are only stored once)

Click to see Topaz in operation

Return on investment

For more information contact us.

Lawyers

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 21:47:27 GMT

Contact

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:28:16 GMT

By Phone
Contact us by phone on 0845 4747917

Our Address
Invocation Software Ltd
417 Silbury Boulevard
Milton Keynes
MK9 2AH
United Kingdom

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Offline Filing and Offline Storage

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:38:36 GMT

Topaz Filer Competition

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:23:43 GMT

We appreciate that when you are looking for an email filing solution you're going to want to compare a number of different products on the market. This article on our Web site explains where we feel we fit in the market and what we feel makes us unique.

We believe that we are the only product on the market that is specifically designed to empower groups of professional people working together.

We do this in the following ways:

No other email filing application is designed to plug into your existing CRM or ERP systems.
No other email filing application can support different classes of message stores. Not using SharePoint today? Store messages on a file system and migrate when the time comes without retraining users. Looking to work with an off-the-shelf DMS system? Not a problem.
We are the only email filing system that works with in-house or bespoke software applications.
We know our users are professional people with high bill rates. Therefore we have put considerable effort into the applicaton to make the filing process as fast and efficient as it possible can be.
Offline mode allows for emails to be filed when the network is not available, and also allows for stored messages to be taken offline for reference whilst offline.
Products on the market that target SharePoint tend to empower groups of individuals working together by creating a shared email store. There are products on the market that target Outlook specifically. These do not create a shared store of emails - they are designed for individual use.

Read on to see how it works...

Saving Emails to a Network Share, Archiving Emails to Disk

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:20:06 GMT

Topaz Filer is designed to be open and can work with any document management or enterprise content management solution. However, a common deployment model is to save the emails directly to a network share. This typically takes advantage of existing investments in SAN/NAS solutions, site-to-site replication, backups.

Once you have defined your filing model, it's very straightforward to create a new or reuse an existing network share.

Features include:

Operates from within the familiar Microsoft Outlook environment
Simple drag-and-drop interface
Full-text search across the entire email store directly from within Outlook (either your emails or yours and your colleagues)
No limits on number of attachments or attachment sizes
Easy to install and configure
Smooth upgrade path to other document management systems when the time comes – UNIQUE IN THE MARKET
Top-down approach – drive your list of customers and projects from your CRM or ERP system – UNIQUE IN THE MARKET
Create a new filing system for your department or firm, or reuse an existing file system – UNIQUE IN THE MARKET
Takes advantage of your existing investment in site-to-site replication, backups, fault tolerance, etc.

In-depth

To file an email, all the user has to do is drag from the Inbox and drop it onto the filing tree:

…and the email is automatically copies to the network share.

Unlike most other email filing solutions, you can then access everyone’s filed emails directly from within the Topaz Filer environment. Full-text searching is completely supported in this mode allowing you to find emails quickly and easily directly from within the familiar Microsoft Outlook environment. (Read more about this – see “[[BrowseStore]]”.)

Also unique to Topaz Filer is the ability to automatically create folders on disk based on information from your CRM, ERP or other database. This feature is called store synchronisation – you can find out more about it here.

Links, Papers and Resources for the Email Corpus Management Community

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:11:40 GMT

This section on our Web site is where we post content we believe is of interest to the email filing and email corpus management community.

Those interested in keeping up to date with this topic, please join us on Twitter and at the Legal IT Professionals LinkedIn group. We have more links on our Useful Links page.

Papers

Email Archiving and Email Filing - What's the Difference? (And Why are Both Important?)
IT teams and businesses have been talking about “email archiving” for a long time, but Topaz Filer is an “email filing” product. What’s the difference? In this article we’ll take you through both types of system and explain why both are important.

Bringing Email Filing to Business - What our customers always say when they want to talk about email filing
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. It includes topics on shared email repositories, closing off project files, replacing printed records, security and reducing the size of the email store.

.PST Files, .PST Problems and .PST Hell
A “.PST file” is a type of file that is used by Microsoft Outlook as a container for email messages. As well as being a native storage format, users can create separate .PST files to store and archive emails into. For example, a company may create a .PST file for a project or set of projects, or .PST files for periods of time. This paper illustrates some of the problems with .PST files.

An Impartial Treatise on Using Google Apps as a Replacement for Microsoft Exchange
At AMX Software, our primary interest is in helping companies manage their email corpus more efficiently, and in such a way that controls risk and helps increase regulatory compliance. As such, we have some interest in the IT systems that organisations use in order to actually send and receive email communications. Google Apps offers significant competition to organisations currently basing "groupware" solutions on Microsoft Exchange. This article discusses the pros and cons of each, and answers important questions related to responsibility and security.

Choosing the Best SharePoint Version for Your Firm
Microsoft SharePoint can be a great way for firms to manage any matter related documentation, including emails. But with Microsoft offering a free version under the name Windows SharePoint Services and a paid version called Microsoft Office SharePoint Services, how do you choose the most appropriate one?

10 Benefits of Email Filing
For this article, we wanted to look at the ways in which a slick, well-oiled electronic email filing system could offer real benefits to you, your team and your organisation. We thought of these ten...

.PST Files, .PST Problems and .PST Hell

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:07:32 GMT

A “.PST file” is a type of file that is used by Microsoft Outlook as a container for email messages. As well as being a native storage format, users can create separate .PST files to store and archive emails into. For example, a company may create a .PST file for a project or set of projects, or .PST files for periods of time.

The principle of creating specialised .PST files is to fix the email silo problem – i.e. get the emails out of an individual user’s mailbox and into a shared repository. However the reality is that there are many problems with working with .PST files in this way and a good percentage of our customers report what attracted them to Topaz Filer is the ability to get rid of .PST files. Sometimes the problems that people have with their .PST files lead them to describe themselves as being in a ".PST hell".

This paper illustrates common problems with using .PST files in this way.

The Crux of the Problems with .PST Files

The essential problem with .PST files is that they are designed as files that are to be used by individuals – they are not designed to be shared. They are also designed to be quite small. (In fact, in the upgrade to Outlook 2007 Microsoft changed the file format from .PST to .OST files and significantly reduced the usable size of these files by introducing a performance problem that occurred when files reached relatively small sizes.)

Because of the design of the .PST file itself, it’s very difficult to create archives of any reasonable size and share these across the network. It’s not possible for multiple people to open the same .PST file at the same time meaning that it’s effectively a single-user system. (Which brings with it the classic problem of one user opening the .PST file, going to lunch and another user needing to open it and being unable to do so.)

Topaz Filer is a server-based system that uses a combination of high-performance database and reliable file system to centrally store and share your organisation’s emails. It’s designed from the ground-up to facilitate information sharing and long-term archival.

Sent Items

A very common usage pattern with Outlook is to create individual folders within the mailbox for clients and projects. Items are then moved from the Inbox to those folders as and when is appropriate. .PST files are a natural extension of this – i.e. creating a separate .PST file and moving out of your main mailbox into a .PST file.

Our research has shown that people generally forget about the items in their “sent items” folder. Whilst many people operate this sort of filing system for inbound emails, the sent remain un-filed and potentially lost. This is obviously extremely risky – if you’ve made any promises over email they are almost certainly to be found in your “sent items”.

The advantage of using Topaz Filer is that it will prompt you whenever you send an email meaning that there is now a structured process in place to properly handle sent items.

Offline

The ability to work away from a network connection to the office is something that every professional desires. .PST files, because they are not designed to be shared, are messy and difficult to work with offline.

Topaz Filer offers a huge advantage here using its powerful offline features – it’s specifically designed to allow mobile workers to take advantage of the filing and retrieval functions whilst offline. Users can queue emails to be filed when the network is available, plus they can nominate projects to download to their laptops.

Search

Outlook’s search features have never been very good, which is why upon installation modern versions of Outlook invite you to download additional components that offer faster searching. If you’re loading and unloading archived .PST files from a network share, acceptable search performance is not available.

With Topaz Filer, full-text searching is server-based meaning that it’s always available and always fast. (Topaz Filer’s full-text search is also available when the application is offline.)

Failures and Stability Problems

The final problem to consider with .PST files is that they are an old format that has problems with stability. It is not unusual to try to open a .PST file to discover that it has been damaged and needs repairing. (There are a large number of tools published by Microsoft and by third-parties to demonstrate the point.) This is clearly a bad issue for an archiving solution to have – an archiving solution obviously has to be extremely stable and reliable.

Conclusion

.PST files are commonly used in organisations as a way of solving the problem that emails locked away individual mailbox “silos” do not facilitate information sharing and archiving. However the file format and the way they are used means that they are acceptable for archiving small email collections for individuals and totally unsuited to sharing stores of information with others in real-time. Topaz Filer offers a better solution, being designed from the ground-up to reliable and securely share information with the whole team. Features such as offline filing and storage, server-based full-text search and sent items prompting dramatically improves the model for email sharing.

Useful Links

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:13:03 GMT

Here are some other resources that you may find of use:

Our Twitter feed (@topazfiler) - links to great content in the world of e-mail management for laywers
Legal Technology Insider
Legal Day
Legal IT Professionals
Delia Venables' Legal IT Resources
e-Legal Technology
Managing Partner Magazine
The Law Gazette (from The Law Society)
Society for Computers and Law
The Lawyer
Legal Week
TweetLaw
Internet Newsletter for Lawyers & Law 2.0
Legal Business
Case in Point (Is funny useful? You decide!)

People we follow particularly closely on Twitter:

Web sites about enterprise content management (ECM), document management systems (DMS), e-discovery:

Beyond Search

Linked In groups:

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

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:24:15 GMT

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.

SharePoint Email Filing with Topaz Filer - Save, Store and Share Emails in SharePoint

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:44:35 GMT

Topaz Filer is designed to be open and can work with any document management or enterprise content management solution. However, we know that Microsoft SharePoint is an understandably popular product and as such we support it natively within the base Topaz Filer package. We beleive the solution offered by Topaz Filer to be one of the best ways on the market of achieving a SharePoint email filing solution. Implementing allows you to store emails in SharePoint, save emails into SharePoint directly from within outlook and share emails in SharePoint with colleagues.

Once you have defined your filing model, it’s a snap to configure the connection to the SharePoint store. Simply provide the URL of your SharePoint site and you are away!

Features include:

Operates from within the familiar Microsoft Outlook environment
Simple drag-and-drop interface
Full-text search across the entire email store directly from within Outlook (either your emails or yours and your colleagues)
No limits on number of attachments or attachment sizes
Easy to install and configure
Smooth upgrade path to other document management systems when the time comes – UNIQUE IN THE MARKET
Top-down approach – drive your list of customers and projects from your CRM or ERP system – UNIQUE IN THE MARKET
Automatically create SharePoint sites and SharePoint document libraries based on new project inception in your CRM or ERP system – UNIQUE IN THE MARKET
Support for MOSS and WSS SharePoint variants

In-depth

To file an email, all the user has to do is drag from the Inbox and drop it onto the filing tree:

…and the email automatically appears within SharePoint:

Unlike most other email filing solutions, you can then access everyone’s filed emails directly from within the Topaz Filer environment. Full-text searching is completely supported in this mode allowing you to find emails quickly and easily directly from within the familiar Microsoft Outlook environment. (Read more about this – see “[[BrowseStore]]”.)

Also unique to Topaz Filer is the ability to automatically create sites within the SharePoint environment based on information from your CRM, ERP or other database. This feature is called store synchronisation – you can find out more about it here.

Need More Information on SharePoint?

Looking to invest in SharePoint but not sure which version to choose? Read our article “How to Choose the Best SharePoint Version for Your Firm”

10 Benefits of Email Filing

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 22:30:06 GMT

For this article, we wanted to look at the ways in which a slick, well-oiled electronic email filing system could offer real benefits to you, your team and your organisation. We thought of these ten…

Improve customer service efficiency. Whenever any of us phone up a customer service representative we never want to explain ourselves and why we’re calling for the 100th time. An email filing system puts all customer interactions in a single narrative. With such a system in place, the representative can simply scroll down and scan the entire email discourse gaining a full picture of what happened prior to taking the call leading to an improved experience for the customer.

Find information when people are on holiday. Email filing is all about getting information into a central location where it can be easily mined. At this time of year with so many people off on leave for the summer it’s common to “lose” information because it’s buried in someone’s private email silo. By having a full email filing store and having a strong full-text search capability against that store it’s easier for colleagues to get at important information in a timely manner.

Be on top of litigation by being on top of information. Email filing and email archiving systems are important tools should your organisation end up in litigation for any reason. Having information to hand on what was and what was not said over email can provide invaluable information to your legal team and help you stay in the driving seat.

Reduce costs associated with paper filing. A lot of organisations, particularly law firms, operate paper-based email filing systems where emails are printed and stored. This sort of system creates considerable cost, most notably in labour but also in toner, paper and storage costs. Replacing the manual system with a wholly electronic store brings with it a whole raft of cost savings and other benefits.

Make your mail server easier to manage. Email systems are not designed to store large amounts of information – rather they are designed to channel information from A to B as quickly as possible. For systems administrators, managing up your email server is a difficult job. By hiving off emails from the email server to a secure and stable archive managing the server infrastructure becomes easier and cheaper.

Comply with your regulatory body’s requirements on email management. Some industries already have tight controls on how electronic information is supposed to be stored and handled. (And going forward, industry regulation is almost guaranteed to become tighter in every industry.) Regulation will always be about keeping good records – a strong email filing solution in your organisation can only support your efforts in this regard.

Reduce human error. Your email filing system can be configured so that everyone works with and files emails in the same way. By automating the process as far as possible the whole team can be whizzing along, working within the defined guidelines and procedures and making very few errors. Moreover, when errors do occur (for example someone files an email in the incorrect location) a workflow can be initiated to solve the problem in a reliable and repeatable manner.

Makes email filing possible when it once was not. Suppose you had wanted to create an email filing system but the drag on your teams productivity made it prohibitive to do so? By using an efficient and powerful email filing system specifically designed to file emails as quickly as possible you now can.

Increases ROI of existing storage technology. Chances are that your email filing systems runs on existing IT infrastructure, and when that infrastructure was put in place a business case would have to have been constructed that justifies the investment. Your email filing system will contribute to the ROI of that infrastructure.

Helps you to get things done. Here at AMX Software we are big fans of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology. (http://www.davidco.com/) A central premise of his system is by getting everything out of your brain and properly filed you can be more efficient and ultimately productive. An email filing system is a strong tool to help you do this by giving you a tidy inbox and filing information away in the right place for later use.

The above 10 advantages apply to all email filing systems. Obviously at AMX Software we would like you to use the one that we develop – Topaz Filer as it satisfies the ten items above and more. Please contact us if you would like a demonstration.

How to Choose the Best SharePoint Version For Your Firm

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:14:54 GMT

Microsoft SharePoint can be a great way for firms to manage any matter related documentation, including emails.

There are two varieties – Windows SharePoint Services (“WSS”) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Service (“MOSS”). The difference between the two is that Microsoft pitches both at different markets.

WSS is includes free with Windows – i.e. properly license Windows and you get this fully-functional document management system for nothing. This means for small to medium sized firms, WSS offers a single repository for documents for just the cost of setting it up.

MOSS is a paid product and builds on the functionality found in WSS. It is designed for larger teams.

Microsoft say that WSS works up until you have about 80-100 users, then it is worth going up to MOSS. The reason for this is that WSS is designed to allow a team to store and store information. MOSS is designed to allow disparate teams to discover information that are created by discrete teams around the organisation. Essentially to understand MOSS, picture a large, multinational company where individual groups in different regions are doing similar things and that information needs to be discovered.

For law firms, although MOSS is designed for information discovery it is not designed to be anywhere near as advanced as the intelligent “e-discovery” tools that are routinely pitched to law firms. MOSS essentially offers a text-based search, whereas good e-discovery tools are designed to work on the basis of finding intelligent information in a corpus of text-based data.

Essentially we recommend SharePoint as a great document repository for storing documents and emails related to matters, mainly because the “free/bundled-with-Windows” version takes care of even large law firms because whilst Microsoft does not consider 80-100 users as being particularly large, for a law firm that level of user count is representative of a pretty decent sized firm.

This is why we designed Topaz Filer to work with SharePoint out-of-the-box. As part of the standard package you get the SharePoint connector that will store emails in:

Windows SharePoint Services 3,
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007,
Windows SharePoint Services 2,
Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

You will also find that our hosted trial is based on a WSS installation, and that the screenshots on the How Topaz Filer Works page are also WSS.

Microsoft’s Web site offers information on MOSS here and on WSS here.

If you do not have a SharePoint implementation in-house and would like to talk to us about implementing one, please visit our page on SharePoint implementation here.

If you already work with an IT partner that provides you with an off-site, hosted SharePoint solution, we can support this scenario - see "Deployment Options".

System Requirements

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:37:52 GMT

This page details the system requirements for Topaz Filer.

Server

The requirements for the server are:

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 or better or Windows Server 2008. (SBS versions of both are supported.)
IIS6 or 7 depending on Windows Server variant
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or Microsoft SQL Server 2008. (Express editions of both are supported. Full-text searching of filed emails requires SQL Server's full-text indexing feature to be installed - see "[[BrowseStore]]".)
.NET Framework 3.5
512MB memory
50MB disk space for binary files, 1GB database space

Client

The requirements for the client application (an Outlook add-in) are:

Microsoft Windows XP SP2 or better, Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 or better.
Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 or Microsoft Office Outlook 2007.
.NET Framework 3.5
512MB memory
50MB disk space

Plug-ins

Some plug-ins have specific system requirements or limitations. Where this is the case it has been noted against the details of each specific plug-in. Please check this information before ordering.

An Impartial Treatise on Using Google Apps as a Replacement for Microsoft Exchange

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 21:20:07 GMT

At AMX Software, our primary interest is in helping companies manage their email corpus more efficiently, and in such a way that controls risk and helps increase regulatory compliance. As such, we have some interest in the IT systems that organisations use in order to actually send and receive email communications.

Readers may care to note that we do not sell Google Apps or Microsoft Exchange, therefore this article is intended as an impartial look as to whether Google Apps is ready for use today as a replacement for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook.

Groupware

Most commercial organisations in the UK use Microsoft Exchange as their “groupware” platform. Groupware is, in IT terms, a now ancient term first coming to prominence in the market in products like Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise. Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook was Microsoft’s answer foray into this space and it has proven very popular. From a modern perspective, groupware describes software that handles problems such as email communication, individual and shared calendaring, collaboration tools and so on.

Some five years ago, Google released a Web-based email platform called Gmail. In true Google style they worked to create buzz around this product by making it invite only . For a while, having an “@gmail.com” email address meant that you were in the “in crowd”.

In the past two or so years, Google has used the Gmail – now called Google Mail – platform as the foundation for what has become a very capable groupware platform called Google Apps. In the next sections, we’ll take a look at what it can do.
Functionality

One thing that is important to appreciate about Google Apps is that it is transparent to your customers and partners. Google expects you to configure the system using your own organisations domain name. Some people think with Google Apps that you have to have “@google.com” email addresses. Not so – you can continue to use any domain names that you already operate. Your customers will not know simply by looking at your email address that you use Google Apps.

The core of Google Apps is the Google Mail email application. This offers essentially what you would expect from any email application, thus I will not enumerate the features here.

There are two ways in which you can use email with Google Apps. Google offer a Web-based frontend that you can use to send and receive emails. This interface is, frankly, slightly strange and does take some getting used to. Google have their own take on how email should be used and the interface reflects this. Equally frankly, it is difficult to put down in works quite how it is different to regular email.

The other way that you can access your email is through Outlook. This provides the same interface for managing emails that you are used to using now through Exchange. This interface is directly supported by Outlook – there is nothing special that you need to do to or with Outlook in order to make this work.

The second most common functionality to use with Outlook/Exchange is calendaring, and indeed Google Apps does support calendaring. Much like how you can on Outlook/Exchange, you can create separate calendars for separate activities and shared calendars within your organisation. However, two things to note here. The calendar application in Google Apps is not as refined as the email application. It can feel a little clunky to use. Secondly, the integration with Outlook is not as refined. In fact, integration of multiple calendars, especially those that relate to resources is not worth trying to integrate in with Outlook. That said, the calendar does work and does the core things that you need – an individual calendar, sharing of calendars with a group and meeting scheduling and planning.

The contacts application is a straightforward, flat contacts list, exactly the same as it is in Outlook. In fact, it’s so straightforward there isn’t anything particularly “wow” to say about it. In truth, most people only require a basic contact list and access to a CRM system for shared contacts.

Something that is entirely missing from Google Apps is the idea of “public folders”. Public folders are hugely popular within the Outlook/Exchange community and create a shared area for storing emails. However, public folders are an interesting problem in that Microsoft have been trying to get rid of them for years and have been promising to deprecate the feature in successive versions of Exchange since 2003. Their argument is that Microsoft SharePoint should be used for storing information, not public folders. Therefore, any organisation considering a migration to Google Apps should note that this feature is missing and an alternative would need to be found.
Outlook/Exchange have a whole slew of smaller features that I have not mentioned here. Tasks are all but missing from Google Apps – although “task-esque” features do keep creeping into the platform. None of the “forms” features are available in Outlook/Exchange make its way in either, so again organisations still using forms need to consider an alternative on migration.

Pricing

It’s the price that makes Google Apps so attractive. There are two options. You can either pay nothing for it – their Standard edition is free for up to 50 users and 7GB of email space per use, or you can pay $50 per user per year for the Premier edition. Standard edition does not come with support. Premier edition does, although the arrangement is slightly odd. You can raise support cases with them over email, but you can only phone them if your system is actually down. In essence, the thing you are likely to panic about most you can phone up and talk to someone about, but anything else you should expect a one business day turnaround on queries.

Compared to Microsoft Exchange this is an absolute steal. You do not have to pay for servers, Exchange licenses or Outlook licences. You also do not need to pay for a remote access infrastructure to access the system, which you would typically do with an “on-premises” Exchange installation.

Security

When we started looking around this article, we asked the IT and business community for their views. Everyone, without exception, expressed concern about their emails being hosted outside of the organisation by a third-party.

This is an easy first reaction, but for me it doesn’t hold much water. My position on this is that Google has to be more secure than virtually any other commercial organisation on the planet. In the first instance, there is no way they could risk any form of major security breach of their systems – a security breach at Google where data was lost or compromised would be the equivalent of a bank losing a customer’s money. The loss of confidence would be catastrophic. In the second instance, Google has hundreds of engineers constantly testing and refining the security on their systems. In essence, Google Apps will be more secure than whatever system you are using right now.

The same argument follows for loss of data. Whilst Google are famously obscure about exactly how their systems work, what is known is that they replicate their data around the world. A catastrophic physical loss (flood, fire or other natural disaster) should be survivable as multiple copies of your data should exist.

You hear the same argument in the community with hosted Microsoft Exchange providers. Again, if you go with a reputable provider, they have too much to lose by not being secure.

BlackBerry Devices

Oddly, it is on the ubiquitous BlackBerry that the system shows the least level of maturity. BlackBerry was designed from the ground-up to work with Microsoft Exchange, so the integration is as close as it possibly can be. Moreover, Research in Motion have done such a superb job of creating a small set of applications that work well together and have given the application suite on the BlackBerry a real feeling of capability and maturity. You generally will not get the same feeling of “slickness” from a BlackBerry working with Google Apps as you would with Exchange.

In fact, I would suggest that if you had a large fleet of BlackBerry devices (anything more than several hundred), you will run into a management problem insofar as BlackBerry devices will automatically provision and update themselves – they are basically “zero touch” devices. If you move to Google Apps you would need to “muck around” with each device to set it up as the user wants it, plus then you would incur an ongoing management cost.

On the flipside, Google Apps will work with any device, not just BlackBerry, so if you have people who want Apple iPhone devices, or other forms of smartphone you can offer them a good, on-the-road groupware experience with little cash outlay, albeit with a good chunk of management time required.

Business Continuance

The big issue for me with using Google Apps is that you have very little control with regards to system uptime – if it fails, you just have to wait until it is made available to you. Public perception is that every few months the system tends to be down for a short while – may be a few hours. On the paid-for, Premium edition Google do over a 99.9% uptime service level agreement (SLA). This is probably, on paper, better than you in-house team offer. But, of course, with an in-house team there is some satisfaction that can be gained by managing to reach a helpdesk. Users of Google’s free (aka “Standard”) edition of Google Apps do not have that advantage, but as mentioned above Premium users can phone a helpdesk.

Availability is one reason why using Outlook with Google Apps makes sense. If you use Google’s Web interface, if the system is down you cannot access your emails at all. If you are using Outlook, Outlook’s local copy will be available even if Google is not.

I discussed above about Google storing multiple copies of your emails around the world for business continuance. Personally we would always recommend using an offsite archive. There are solutions available for a number of providers that will intercept emails entering and leaving the Google Apps system and archive them. (We have a paper available on our Web site called “Email Archiving and Email Filing, Why are Both Imporant?” that goes into this in more detail.)

Systems Administration

The easy answer on “systems administration” is that it is much simpler, much easier and will most likely cost you much less. Your IT department simply needs to define the users on the platform and provide an Internet connection such that users can access the system. There are no servers, no backup issues and (depending on if you allow users to keep using Outlook) no client configuration issues.

Of course, some companies use hosted Exchange solutions, of which there are many different providers available. Companies that use a hosted provider for Exchange get the same advantage as per Google Apps.

Topaz Filer

It wasn’t our intention with this paper to talk much about our product, Topaz Filer. Topaz Filer is an email filing system which is designed to take emails out of an email store, like Exchange or Google Apps, and put them in a location where they can be intelligently shared by the whole team. In fact, we don’t have much to say about Topaz Filer with regards to Google Apps – our application works with Google Apps, therefore it does not matter to the application whether you use Exchange or Google Apps.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have outlined the features of Google Apps that compare with those available to organisations that run Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook as their groupware feature. The email functionality, I believe, is as good as that offered by Outlook/Exchange. The calendar is good enough for general use, but the Outlook/Exchange version is better. The experience for BlackBerry users is better with Outlook/Exchange than Google Apps, and practically those managing large fleets of BlackBerry devices would struggle to support a Google Apps platform in as cost-effective a manner.

That said, Google Apps is massively cheaper and easier to manage than Outlook/Exchange and the actual on-the-ground user experience, and the experience for your customers and partners is entirely transparent. In my opinion, Google Apps offers a considerable competitive challenge to Microsoft in that for small organisations, such as those with less than 100 people, there are highly compelling reasons to choose Google Apps over Microsoft Exchange.

Thanks to Rob Ameerun of Legal IT Professionals (www.legalitprofessionals.com) for his help in gathering the community feedback that helped shaped this paper.

AMX Software Releases Email Filing “In the Cloud” Via Their New Hosted Offering

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:50:21 GMT

Milton Keynes, 05/June/2009 – Organisations are increasingly feeling the pressure of needing to properly manage their “email corpus”, the collective term for the body of emails that are sent and received by an organisation during its life. Increasing regulatory and accountability demands placed on firms means that over the next few years this pressure will certainly increase.

Bigger firms find it easy to implement “email filing systems”, a classification of software package that allows employees to file inbound and outbound email against interactions with customers. Today, AMX Software Ltd is pleased to announce a solution for the smaller firm.

Topaz Filer HT is a hosted, cloud-based solution that allows smaller companies access to the kinds of email filing and email corpus management solutions that larger organisations have.

“The principle is simple,” said Matthew Baxter-Reynolds, Managing Director of AMX, manufactures of Topaz Filer. “Rather than the small firm having to maintain the hardware and software for an email filing solution in-house, we do all that for them.”

For a small monthly service fee the Topaz Filer HT software is made available securely and reliably over the Internet. Employees within the firm use the familiar Microsoft Outlook environment and file emails by selecting the particular “customer interaction” (project, matter, etc.) from a list. A copy of the email is sent to the Topaz Filer HT servers where the email is stored within a managed Microsoft SharePoint implementation. Everything is done with concerns for security being paramount.

“Cloud computing offerings are very fashionable at the moment,” continued Matthew Baxter-Reynolds, “but the reality is that cloud-based solutions like Topaz Filer HT make it very easy for companies to obtain sophisticated and powerful solutions on a low monthly rental rather than having to make large capital expenditures. We believe Topaz Filer HT offers a significant opportunity to the smaller firm who wants the same sort of ‘big iron’ email filing and email corpus management solution that their larger competitors have.”

To find out more, Google for “topaz filer” and click through to the Topaz Filer HT page.

Press Releases

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:15:35 GMT

If you have any questions regarding any of the press releases in this seciton, please contact us.

AMX Software Releases Email Filing “In the Cloud” Via Their New Hosted Offering

Deployment Options

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:27:29 GMT

There are three ways in which Topaz Filer can be deployed. This article will take you through them.

As background, you may wish to read Integrating Topaz Filer With Your Systems before proceeding.

"On-premises" Deployment

This is the “classic style” of installing an application. In this scenario you will already have a server for your filing model (practice management system [“PMS”], customer relationship management [“CRM”] or similar), a server for your store (document management system [“DMS”] or SharePoint) and the Topaz Filer server. Users then run Topaz Filer from within Microsoft Outlook. All of this occurs on your private network. This diagram illustrates:

(In reality most customers will not have a dedicated piece of hardware for the Topaz Filer server and will run the application on an existing server that undertakes other activities.)

The advantage of this approach is that you have maximum flexibility as to the filing model and the store. The disadvantage of the approach is that it Topaz Filer becomes another thing for your IT team to manage.

Hosted SharePoint

See Filing Emails with Microsoft SharePoint for more information on SharePoint.

SharePoint is becoming more and more prevalent as a document store for law firms and other professional service firms. Microsoft is continuing to make heavy investment into the product, and it integrates excellently with Office 2007. In addition, it’s price point is significantly below more traditional DMS and enterprise content management (“ECM”) providers.

A common deployment strategy for SharePoint is to partner with another organisation such that the SharePoint implementation is “outsourced” as a managed process. Topaz Filer can handle this deployment, illustrated with this diagram:

In this approach you still have flexibility with regards to the filing model, and you also need a Topaz Filer server as per the on-premises deployment above.

The advantage of this approach is that your IT team does not have to worry about managing the SharePoint installation. Perhaps more importantly, these services also provide guarantees with regards to backing up the information in the SharePoint store. The disadvantages with the approach are that accessing SharePoint over the Internet will be a little bit slower and you are dependent on a third-party managing your data.

Fully Hosted Solution - aka "Topaz Filer HT"

For customers that are keen to have email filing capability with SharePoint as the store but want a “low impact” on their IT department we offer a fully managed service whereby we run the servers. We call it Topaz Filer HT. All that needs to be installed on your computers is the add-in to Microsoft Outlook that enables the functionality. This diagram illustrates:

For more information, please read Fully Hosted Solution - "Topaz Filer HT".

Fully Hosted Solution - "Topaz Filer HT"

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:23:15 GMT

There is a trend in Information Technology towards applications and services that are provided by others, as opposed to having to have an in-house provision. This has been known over recent years as “Software as a Service” (“SaaS”), or the slightly nattier “cloud computing”.

The principle of cloud computing is that it shifts the burden related to managing and the cost of running a given IT system to some third party. In effect it is a form of outsourcing.

We have had a number of customers discuss with us their desire to have a fully hosted, outsourced, aka “cloud-based” solution and we are pleased to be able to offer it. It goes by the name Topaz Filer HT.

Notionally, the system looks as per the diagram below. The instances of Microsoft Outlook running in your office talk to a server that we manage for you and from them to a SharePoint implementation that is used to store your emails offsite.

There are two limitations to our hosted solution – you can only file emails within Microsoft SharePoint and the integration with your practice management system (“PMS”) or customer relationship management system (“CRM”) is limited. (This is not the case with our “on premises” installation – you can store the emails in anything and have tight integration with your PMS/CRM.)

However there are typically no implementation costs involved, there is no up-front commitment and you “pay as you go”.

You will need a separate SharePoint provision. You may already have a partner, in which case we will be happy to deal with them, or you may like us to refer one of our partners onto you.

Please contact us if you would like to discuss Topaz Filer HT in more detail.

Email Archiving and Email Filing - What's the Difference? (And Why are Both Important?)

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 20:12:42 GMT

IT teams and businesses have been talking about “email archiving” for a long time, but Topaz Filer is an “email filing” product. What’s the difference? In this article I’ll take you through both types of system and explain why both are important.

History of Email Systems

Early email systems were designed like this: when you sent an email to someone, your email client would send the email to your email server and store a copy of it locally in your “sent items”. Your mail server would then find out where the recipients mail server was and transfer the email over where it would sit in the recipient’s mailbox. When the recipient connected the email would be transferred from the server to the recipient’s email client and stored in the recipient’s local inbox.

The problem with this arrangement is that once the email has been received only two copies of it exist – your copy in your sent items and the recipient’s copy in their inbox. This diagram illustrates – the “ghostly” emails show you where temporary copies were stored as part of the transfer process.

The problem with this arrangement is that it is inherently unsafe in that if you lost your sent items folder, deleted the email or your computer was put out of action you would lose your copy. Conversely, the recipient has a similar problem – in essence emails that live in this sort of system are too volatile given that they could contain highly valuable and potentially critical information.

The next stage of development of email systems was to ask the server to hold the “master copy” of the user’s inbox. This solved the problem of the user’s computer being put beyond use – the server copy would still be available even if the user’s computer was destroyed or damaged. This diagram illustrates:

This approach limits accidental loss of the user’s mailbox as the IT teams that manage the servers are typically pretty good at keeping the server safe and secure and backing it up. However it doesn’t solve the problem of users deleting their emails – i.e. effectively allowing users to change the “master copy” of the email corpus through deleting (and possibly modifying) email messages.

Email Archiving

The problem that email archiving solves is illustrates by the following: Fred sends an email to a customer admitting fault for a customer’s problem and outlining a proposal for resolution. Bill (the customer) receives the email writes back confirming the course of action. In the meantime, Fred deletes that email from his “sent items” and Bill’s response from his inbox and leaves the company.

Several months later the problem still exists and Bill’s company decides to escalate action against Fred’s company. Fred has left. The email trial admitting the problem and agreeing a course of action has been lost. If litigation follows Fred’s company is in a weaker position because essential evidence is gone.

The principle of email archiving is that any emails that pass through the server are written to a separate store that cannot be modified. This email archive is essentially a giant “bucket” that every inbound and outbound email message is written to. This diagram illustrates:

The advantage of this arrangement is clear – Fred cannot either innocently or maliciously destroy evidence by either deleting or modify the working copy of the email in his mailbox. The mailbox no longer contains the master copy.

It is absolutely essential that any law firm or professional service firm operates an email archiving system. There are two systems that we recommend.

If you are looking for a fully managed, outsourced, “cloud based” approach we recommend MessageLabs Hosted Email Archiving Service for Exchange.
If you are looking for a solution where you maintain the archive “in-house” on your own servers, we recommend GFI Mail Archiver.

But, as we are about to see email archiving is only part of the solution. It solves the basic problem of not losing e-mails, but it does not provide for a smart way of handling your email corpus.

Email Filing

Email filing, as opposed to email archiving, is the process of assigning a given email to a given activity that your firm is undertaking. For law firms emails are allocated to client matters. For other sorts of organisations, emails are allocated to customer projects. Emails may also be allocated to internal projects – such as organising a works outing or building a new HR policy.

Email archiving is not a particularly intelligent process. An email archive is just a giant collection of emails. You can conceptualise it as being a room with a single laser printer in it – whenever an email is sent or received a copy of the email is “printed”, and put into a box next to the printer. Once the box is full, a new box is created and the process continues. Ultimately you have a very neat, very big set of “virtual boxes” containing the email corpus in its entirety.

Much like any corpus, the value of it lies in making sense of the information contained within. By structuring and arranging systems to keep track of and record conversations in a manner aligned to the original discourse, information can be more readily discovered and meaning discerned.

Moreover, email archiving lodges the emails in a separate to the rest of the electronic data related to the project. For example, Word documents, faxes, scanned letters and so on will all live within the document management system (“DMS”). Unless e-mails are also stored in the DMS you have to look in two places to find the information you need.

This diagram illustrates the ideal approach of having a single location containing all documentation:

But by not bringing emails through to the matter file (i.e. by leaving them in the archive, or worse – in individual users’ mailboxes), there is a disconnect – users have to go elsewhere to find the information that they need. For example:

Our product, Topaz Filer, is designed to solve this problem. Working alongside existing email archiving products (such as the two called out above), and by integrating with SharePoint or another document management/electronic content management system it is now possible to have a simple and effective mechanism for bringing the relevant parts of the email corpus “front and centre” with the remainder of the documentation the team needs to do their work.

You can find out more about our email filing product, Topaz Filer, by watching our Introductory Video or by reading our How it Works article.

Conclusion

In this paper we have shown that it is essential that any firm that uses email must have a strong email archival policy so that any inbound and outbound email messages are captured and stored. By having a reliable record of all email correspondence, you can be sure that the one critical email you need is available to you.

However we have also shown that simply defining a “huge bucket” where all emails end up is not sufficient. Firms that use email either as their primary form of a communication or where email makes up an important part of the communication need to use an email filing system in conjunction with an email archiving system in order to create a single source of electronic information related to a matter.

How to Buy an "On Premises" Installation

Thu, 28 May 2009 14:58:31 GMT

"On premises" installations are sold on a per-user basis, with optional maintenance and optional add-in modules to connect to different types of customer relationship management systems (CRM), practice management systems (PMS), accountancy systems, SharePoint and document management systems (DMS).

User Pricing

Licensing is based on the number of users that will be using the system, with discounts available the more licenses are purchased in a single transaction.

Plug-ins

Readers may wish to review "Integrating Topaz Filer With Your Systems" before proceeding.

The base system price of Topaz Filer includes the capability to read the filing model from any SQL Server or ODBC-compliant database and store emails on a network share.

Store plug-ins are available at extra cost to store emails in SharePoint or in a number of marketing-leading document management systems. Similarly plug-ins are available for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and other CRM and PMS systems.

Maintenance

Email based support with a two working day response rate is available free of charge.

For users that require same day response to queries and 9-5 Monday to Friday (UK time) telephone support, plus free upgrades (point versions only) we offer a Platinum Support service at a charge of 15% of system price per year.

Custom Development

Topaz Filer is designed to be open and to fit into any business. However if you have specific integration needs or other specific requirements, please contact us.

Hosted Solution

As an alternative, you can purchase Topaz Filer as a hosted solution.

Store Synchronisation Module

Thu, 28 May 2009 14:56:54 GMT

One of the perennial problems for firms that operate practice management systems (PMS) and document management systems (DMS) from different vendors is synchronising the two so that matters are available in both systems. In the following instance users are actually working with two systems – the DMS for storing documents and the PMS for other activities.

(Those customers interested in using SharePoint can substitute “DMS” with “SharePoint” for the rest of this discussion as the functionality is the same.)

From a practice management perspective, what’s important is that upon matter inception, a definition of the matter is created within both the PMS and the DMS. If the matter inception process is manual this can be problematic for the practice management staff. Moreover from the user’s perspective it is essential that both applications are kept in sync.

Topaz Filer offers a solution to this problem via the store synchronisation module. Because a key competency of ours is coordinating the operation of the PMS and DMS, we can automatically create areas within the DMS by detecting when matters are incepted within the PMS.

This feature is included as standard in Topaz Filer.

Readers should note that the store synchronisation feature operates fully without requiring users to use the email filing functionality.

Join us on Twitter, Subscribe to our Feeds

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 22:11:37 GMT

Our Twitter feed can be a great way of keeping up-to-date with what we are doing as a company and our products, and also what's happening in the world of e-mail management generally. You can also subscribe to our RSS feed, which is updated as we make changes to the site.

You can also find out what Matthew Baxter-Reynolds, our Managing Director and Chief Software Architect is discussing on his Twitter page and blog:

E-mail Management for Businesses Operating in Regulated Industries

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 23:06:36 GMT

We're still working on this paper.

Subscribe to our Twitter feed or RSS feed and we'll tell you when it's ready.

Training

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 10:00:13 GMT

We offer onsite training services to help you and your team get up-to-speed with using the product. Please contact us for a quote.

Support

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:38:21 GMT

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