Following the Trail...

Use ECM to effectively track and manage elusive emails.

Keeping track of important emails that go in and out of your organization can be as difficult as trying to follow something through thick snow. Just when you think you’ve got it under control, the wind blows or more snow falls…and you lose the trail.

While some might enjoy the thrill of the hunt as they look for a needed email message, the search creates a headache for most of us, and sometimes even causes legal issues. Importing, classifying, and storing emails and attachments securely in a digital document repository is the starting point for effective email management. Enterprise content management (ECM) software provides the tools you need to follow your otherwise hard-to-track email trails.

“Email management that is part of an integrated ECM solution follows the transactional trail of email as it does with any record, from the point of generation or capture throughout the active business cycle, archival as a record, and eventual destruction according to business policies,” states the article Email and e-Discovery: Tips for Archiving Elusive Digital Content.

The article offers further advice about things to look for if you’re searching for an email management system. Be sure the software can:

• Watch multiple directories simultaneously for incoming files and email messages.
• Blacklist and whitelist emails and/or attachments so you can ensure imported communications are relevant to your business.
• Specify conditional indexing. (Example: automatically extracting and indexing an alphanumerical string that appears at the start of email subject lines as document IDs and customer names.)
• Configure the email importer to trigger a business process for each individual attachment (rather than launching one process for the entire group of attachments) so you can maximize the use of each document.
• Produce clear audit trails of emails/attachments that were imported, indexed, viewed, annotated, versioned, output, or re-indexed into ECM.

Check out the article to view the complete checklist of email management features. It will help ensure you’re informed when you’re ready to look for a solution.

Bottom line:

If you want to clear the way for effective email management, it isn’t as simple as organizing and storing messages within your email client. An ECM system helps to ensure that critical email messages--along with their attachments--are consistently imported and indexed into a secure repository for easy retrieval or used to kick-start pertinent business processes.

Talk with us:

Contact us today to get help following the trail of your corporate email or to learn more about our email management solution.

For more information or to schedule a demonstration, please Contact DocFinity now.