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You’ve got mail managed

Editorial Type: Review     Date: 05-2015    Views: 7775   







Mail Manager 6.1 from Oasys turns the traditional chore of email handling into a productive management tool.

Even though I am a sole user, I think I count as a ‘power emailer’ with an understanding of the problem Mail Manager from Oasys seeks to solve for businesses. I have upwards of 35,000 emails distributed between a dozen separate folders, and when I want to search for something I have to be quite specific, otherwise pages of results pop up.

There is no connection between my emails and the information they relate to either. Companies send press releases, technical information and images, which I duly file away in the appropriate folder, but there is absolutely no record of where it was sent or why. I barely understand the logic behind my own filing system as it has evolved over the last couple of decades, but there is no way anyone else coming upon it would find anything useful in it.

By and large, then, the sort of things that I can't do on my system are precisely those that are vital to any large organisation, and which Mail Manager addresses perfectly. To retain the link between emails and the projects they are associated with, both emails and the project documentation are stored within the same folder. That makes searches that much easier, although Mail Manager has a sophisticated set of filters specifically designed to optimise the search process.

My shortcomings with regard to filing emails and ensuring that others know where I have put them are also addressed, as Mail Manager prompts with a suitable storage location when emails are opened, and both incoming and outgoing emails are filed within common locations in the cloud server, so there’s no danger that I could go walkabout - or get fired! - without the organisation being able to access everything I’d been working on.

As for remembering where I put things a couple of years down the line, well Mail Manager includes an audit trail that knows when I sent what, and to whom, what their response was and, more to the point, what documentation accompanied our digital correspondence.

Talking of which, Mail Manager can also depict email traffic graphically, enabling managers to see at a glance who has been talking to whom, who is working in isolation without communicating with anybody, and where most traffic has been routed within any project. Besides creating a secure storage system for emails, Mail Manager also has an effective solution for archiving old emails in an organised manner.

SO WHAT'S NEW?
Having been developed to serve the AEC industry, it soon became apparent that the problems of effectively managing email systems aren’t just limited to construction, but are applicable wherever communication by email has become the norm. Mail Manager is therefore directed at all large organisations and can work as a plug-in to the widely used Microsoft Outlook users, enabling them to manage their interpersonal communications in a more secure and efficient way. It contains a number of tools that allow users to file emails and documents more quickly, run faster searches with advanced filtering, and share folders more easily.

Mail Manager not only slashes the time wasted on managing an organisation’s emails but also effectively formalises it, providing a framework that individual users find easy to learn and work with (it’s estimated that a couple of hours are quite sufficient for users to come to grips with Mail Manager and to start using it productively).

So, how has the latest version, Mail Manager 6.1, managed to enhance its productivity further? For a start, there's a fresh user interface, faster filing with more filtering options, a refined dialogue for even quicker searches, easier folder sharing and brand new support for Bentley ProjectWise.

FILE, SEARCH AND COLLECTIONS
File, Search and Collections are three fundamentals of Mail Manager. Collections are filing locations for groups of connected people - architects, engineers, project members, etc. - or personal selections such as BIM and Marketing. File and Search provide users with a number of ways of receiving, redistributing, storing and retrieving emails and associated documents, applying a bit of intelligence by learning favoured destinations and recipients to speed up the process. The more you use the software, the more intelligent it becomes.



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