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People- vs. Project-Centric Email Workflow
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 1, 2021 at 09:23 AM
It’s a fascinating problem, especially for small businesses without dedicated IT departments.
I looked into this at great length back in the early 2000s, and concluded that Novell GroupWise would indeed be the best all-round solution for this kind of requirement (a fundamental business requirement, in fact). Nothing else came close. But implementing GroupWise would have cost us an arm and a leg, so we used a combination of solutions in the end, including a powerful piece of Australian groupware that is now, alas, defunct. Now, of course, GroupWise is also defunct.
I have been amazed by the failure of IT developers to get a really user-friendly handle on this. There are solutions around for small businesses, but most of them focus on specific aspects (e.g. bookkeeping/accounting, document management, e-mail backups) with very limited cross-functional support. Larger businesses must turn to expensive consultants, first, to sell them the systems (and good luck with finding an “independent” consultant for that!) and second, to configure them so they work properly. This, based on chats with colleagues involved in IT, is by no means guaranteed to work; external consultants rarely understand internal processes as well as they pretend to (and in any case, are liable to select off-the-shelf configurations just to make their own lives easier).
User-friendly solutions that can be implemented by an SME are very thin on the ground. I can think of two that have impressed me recently: MarketCircle’s DayLite suite (https://www.marketcircle.com/), and the German solution Revolver (https://revolver.info/ – not available in English). Both of them, interestingly, are Mac-based, and in both cases, the pricing is pretty robust.
Of course there is a rapidly growing number of web apps that claim to be all-singing, all-dancing business management solutions – many of them fulfilling this promise by offering “integrations” with other (online) software. But many – I dare say most – SMEs are not delighted by the idea of running their entire business management operation through a third party, let alone multiple third parties. My Financial Director was appalled when it became apparent that to keep using QuickBooks, we were going to have to abandon the desktop app and use the (strikingly inferior) online version.
We’ve not found anything that suits us perfectly, which means we rely on shared group inboxes (something that IMAP servers are perfectly capable of, without any sophisticated additions – but you do have to trust everybody with access to a shared inbox) and a rigorously defined file system using set formulae for storing files; key project folders are synced using Datto Workspace (a very powerful Dropbox equivalent for businesses).
I haven’t found a perfect way to integrate e-mails – project-critical ones are generally printed out to the relevant project folders as PDFs, but it’s far from ideal. E-mails are automatically backed up to a centralised server, however, using MailStore (another outstanding German product with a fantastic search engine). This particular solution doesn’t run on Mac (more details at https://www.mailstore.com/); for a good Mac-based backup solution, you could do worse than Mail Backup X (http://inventpure.com/), but it’s not as good as MailStore.
Microsoft SharePoint I’ve experimented with, but like most MS “enterprise” products, it’s not SME-friendly (despite many avowals to the contrary); to use the online version, you have to sell your soul to Microsoft. Fair enough, you will say, but it’s not something I’m happy to do. I live in hope that a fully integrated SME-friendly solution will appear in the near future, and meanwhile keep an eye on DayLite, just in case they decide to moderate their pricing…
Cheers,
Bill
Posted by Leib Moscovitz
Dec 1, 2021 at 10:33 AM
>That’s true, Leib. But you get a .msg file that you can only open
>successfully using Outlook (other e-mail clients either do not open the
>msg file at all or at least not correctly). You’d need a DMS or a
>database tool or a search tool (such as Lookeen) that can handle msg
>files.
Again, don’t know whether this would help, but you might also use a regular file manager which allows for internal display of .msg or .eml files - both XYplorer and Directory Opus handle this well.
Posted by Larry Kollar
Dec 1, 2021 at 03:05 PM
Ken wrote:
> ... I do wonder why MS has
>not really offered a way to effectively save an email message with all
>of its data intact as a separate file? You can kind of save out a
>message, but the attempts I have seen do not look easy or user friendly.
We’re stuck with all-Microsoft at work, too. My Outlook has a button in the “Move” section of the ribbon to copy a message to OneNote. You can share notebooks, so maybe that would be the way to go?
Sharepoint, at least for us, turned into a data swamp. The only way to effectively navigate it is to get a link from someone who knows where the good stuff is, then be religious about saving bookmarks.
Posted by satis
Dec 2, 2021 at 02:13 PM
MadaboutDana wrote:
> for a good Mac-based backup solution, you could do worse than
> Mail Backup X (http://inventpure.com/)
The specs look good for it but I’ve been wary because it’s always on sale somewhere, at differing prices (AppSumo and StackSocial right now, for $49 and $59) - and even on its own site it’s $29 down form $79 but there is also an unknown discount available if you fill out a questionnaire on the site and wait for an email from them.
Also, when searching I never find reviews, just hits for sales.
Again, it looks good, but I’ve found that using EagleFiler ( https://c-command.com/eaglefiler/ $50, or $40 with coupon code if you’re a Tidbits.com member) is an easy way to backup mail messages (.eml format) or entire mailboxes (.mbox format) - and can import from webmail or all major Mac mail apps - that can easily be searched.
https://c-command.com/eaglefiler/help/importing-mail
More generally, I also use it as a replacement for Devonthink.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Dec 2, 2021 at 10:09 PM
Excellent overview, many thanks!
MadaboutDana wrote:
>It’s a fascinating problem, especially for small businesses without dedicated IT departments.