Keeping a grip on your e-mail
If you are like me, the first thing you do when you get into your office or log in on a home computer, is that you check your e-mail. You sort through and delete the various marketing offers, review those “all- company” e-mails, and finally narrow down your list of e-mails that are most pertinent to your daily work life. You respond to those e-mails that require your action, and you may file those e-mails in your various folders that you have set up in Exchange, Notes, or other e-mail. You are keeping them as part of your record.
This is fairly common, because e-mail has replaced traditional mail as the preferred means of business communication. And most people get more e-mails every year, which is a trend that is likely to continue. However, despite the increase in e-mail communications between companies, few organizations have found effective means to filter and store these business records.
Finding any or all e-mail communications regarding a specific business matter can be a time consuming process for any IT professional. The reason for this is that, simply put, e-mail management tools are not able to keep up with the raw number of e-mails sent and received each day.
Every day, when we meet with our customers, this matter becomes a focal point of our conversations. How do you get your arms around the material? In the event of litigation, how do you produce the required e-mails without hours and hours of data mining?
These questions can be answered with a well thought out Document Management Strategy, and by utilizing Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technology. ECM streamlines the capture of this data, automates the indexing of the e-mail in order to make retrieval more efficient, and in the case of our flagship product, Docuware, runs full text OCR (Optical Character Recognition). This allows any IT professional to search the repository by word or phrase in order to find what they are looking for.
The best part is that it will search not only sender, receiver, or subject, but also the content of the body and the content of the attachments. This amazing technology can take a process which previously would require many hours and potentially thousands of dollars, and reduce it to a few key strokes and produce the same results in seconds.
By researching the technology available, business managers can insure that they keep the business records that they need, find them when needed, and meet any compliance requirements that they have.
Until we blog again-
Jason Ruston