We are dealing with explosive growth in the number of project-related email messages; management of email presents a huge challenge and negative consequences of inadequate management can also be huge.
Challenges companies are facing
- How and where can I centrally store incoming and outgoing project email?
- Do I need to save the message, the attachment(s) or both?
- How do I prevent multiple project members from saving the same email?
- How do I alert project members that email is centrally stored and available?
- Do I need to store project email exclusively in a central project site or also in Outlook?
Adequate email management is crucial to properly control exchange of information in projects. Unstructured and unmanaged email makes it difficult or impossible to know which project message (with or without attachments) is sent to whom, which project message has been received, where messages and attachments are duplicated, where copies of obsolete attachments are retained and possibly used, etc. Not only do these issues introduce organizational inefficiencies and errors, they can cause serious problems achieving and proving regulatory compliance and effectively handling legal disputes.
Managing incoming and outgoing email
Despite its problems, email is indispensable for exchanging information between project members, both internal and external. For example, project email often includes important information like agreements, confirmations, tasks, contracts and project documents, and this importance requires it to be managed properly. But how do you accomplish this? Where do you store project email so it is centrally available to all project members and is consolidated with other project information? How do you deal with saving email that is sent to multiple recipients? And how do you prevent the same email from being stored multiple times?
Central project mailbox
Some project organizations have chosen to use one central project email address, a project mailbox (e.g. project@company.com). Although this makes it centrally accessible, users still do not control such mailbox. For example, all email is unstructured and can easily be moved or deleted without anyone noticing. Many companies use Public Folders in Outlook, but this also does not solve the management problem. Microsoft not only stated that Public Folders are not meant for this purpose but also indicated that Public Folders will be removed from Outlook in the future. Apart from that, in both situations the message is still kept in Outlook and is not an integral part of a central project environment. Further, it is not possible to add additional properties (metadata), making it easier to find and organize.
The ability to store outgoing email in a project environment is also important to consider. And when sender and recipient work in the same project, it is not useful for both to store the same email. Replying to and forwarding it poses an additional issue when the original message is included in the reply, since it is not always helpful to keep that original message.
Email management in SharePoint
Cadac Organice Explorer helps with all these problems. Cadac Organice Explorer integrates SharePoint with MS Outlook allowing you to store and manage email and attachments in SharePoint. This makes it centrally accessible to all internal and external project members that have access to the SharePoint project environment.
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