The importance of a well structured email system (3 of 3)

Email is not a document management system!

Another misconception about email is that all employees need to see it to "retrieve documents" if need be.

This is not the way to securely run a business, people!

If you want to store documents electronically there are a couple of options. The most popular of these options is either Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM) or Document Management Intranets (internal company websites). Each of these solutions ensures that documents are stored and organised be they by customer (CRM) or by department (Intranet).
The reason that you want to use a system which is designed for this as converse to email is three-fold:

1. Search
With a dedicated system you can search easily through all documents that not only you have saved in your inbox, but things that other people have sent to the clients in question or with regards to the department in which you work.

2. Backup
Email archiving is not really a backup at all. For one, it natively backs up to the PC that the individual is using and secondly you can severely decrease your mail servers performance by keeping absolutely everything that you have in your history forever. You need a storage facility for this which is separate to your email server which needs to perform at the highest level all the time to ensure efficiency in the workplace.

3. Functionality
Email can only store emails and attachments - it cannot record phone calls to and from a customer, different contacts at a company that you service, you cannot collaborate on documents and enlist version control on large projects. Email is a singular stream of communications - email. Productivity platforms such as CRM and Intranet systems do exactly that - enhance productivity- and they do it by centralising records of all streams of communication.

One of the things that made email great was it's simplicity. The whole concept of "I am going to contact Mark at Evolve IT therefore I will type mark@evolveit.com.au" is brilliantly simple and there are business owners and business managers out there that are complicating it to a point that it loses it's glorious simplicity that we have all grown to love.

If you need some advice on how to get the most of your email system, then please contact Evolve IT here and we will put you on the right path.