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People- vs. Project-Centric Email Workflow
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Posted by Paul Korm
Nov 30, 2021 at 06:10 PM
@Ken, when you meet with staff, keep in mind it is not a technical gap in the software your agency bought, it is about altering business rules and roles and perhaps asking administrators and managers to do something a bit different. The agency owns the capabilities—but willingness to change how the technology is configured and administrated is always the challenge. Good luck!
Posted by Ken
Dec 1, 2021 at 12:51 AM
Paul Korm wrote:
@Ken, when you meet with staff, keep in mind it is not a technical gap
>in the software your agency bought, it is about altering business rules
>and roles and perhaps asking administrators and managers to do something
>a bit different. The agency owns the capabilities—but willingness
>to change how the technology is configured and administrated is always
>the challenge. Good luck!
Yes, the wheels of IT change often move slowly even though the tools are there. After thinking about this a bit today, 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. If I could just run a script to save out flagged messages as discrete files, then they could be easily uploaded like other files (and would hopefully be searchable as well) into a commonly accessed site or folder location.
—Ken
Posted by James Salla
Dec 1, 2021 at 05:48 AM
There are document management systems that will let you upload emails as well as stand-alone files to what is, in effect, a giant database. Some of them might have some kind of tagging system that would let you assign specific emails to specific projects. The tagging system would have to permit combinations of tags. One of the problems I’ve noticed with using email as an informal “data dump” is that often people write about multiple projects or topics in a single emails. That’s why MS-Outlook’s foldering system isn’t very useful for email - the same email might belong in more than one folder, but it won’t let you do that.
Posted by Leib Moscovitz
Dec 1, 2021 at 08:06 AM
After thinking about this a bit today, 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.
> If I could just run a script to save out flagged messages as discrete
>files, then they could be easily uploaded like other files (and would
>hopefully be searchable as well) into a commonly accessed site or folder
>location.
>
>—Ken
Not fully sure that I understood Ken correctly, but there is a very simple way to save email messages with all data intact, including attachments, formatted text etc.: just drag the message out of a normal email client (Outlook or TB) to the desktop and then rename it if desired; you can also save multiple emails this way. (I do this all the time, albeit in a home environment = for my academic research and the like, rather than a business environment.)
Posted by Franz Grieser
Dec 1, 2021 at 08:59 AM
Leib Moscovitz wrote:
>Not fully sure that I understood Ken correctly, but there is a very
>simple way to save email messages with all data intact, including
>attachments, formatted text etc.: just drag the message out of a normal
>email client (Outlook or TB) to the desktop and then rename it if
>desired; you can also save multiple emails this way. (I do this all the
>time, albeit in a home environment = for my academic research and the
>like, rather than a business environment.)
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.