In this article, we will explore best practices as they relate to managing emails in your organization.
Emails have immense business value, and they are often overlooked when considering what is a record. People do not often spend the time filing away or managing emails which are considered important records for the organization.
Part of this problem is solved through policy instruments (and related training) covering the following topics:
Defining when somebody should save an e-mail as a record
Defining where someone should save an e-mail
Defining the policy about how long emails should be stored
Beyond the change management, there are tools you can implement to make e-mail management easier for end-users.
Tools to help with filing emails
With SharePoint Online as a document repository and Exchange Online as your email provider, it can be very time consuming for end users to put documents in the right place and tag it with the right metadata. This action often involves multiple steps and screens, as there is no singular flow that could streamline this action for your users.
This has created a market for tools like Colligo, e-mail manager, which allows you to connect Outlook inboxes with the appropriate SharePoint storage areas to file emails much quicker. When you use a tool such as this, it becomes as simple as clicking a button on an e-mail, selecting the destination, and entering the metadata in-order to properly file an e-mail away.
The key benefit of this tool is that it makes it as simple as possible to file emails as records, whereby making them easy to find and easy to reference in the future. It is imperative that the information stored within your organization's emails is not locked in outlook permanently, improving your findability, and reducing your dependency on individual people.
One of the key advantages of Colligo is its ability to detach attachments from emails, simplifying the process of saving documents embedded in emails as distinct records. This feature is particularly useful in scenarios where a user receives an email with an attachment that needs to be filed in a specific case file in SharePoint Online. Integrating Colligo with Outlook improves the user experience, minimizes the effort required for change management, and streamlines the process of filing emails as records in SharePoint Online, while also enabling formal management of the records' lifecycle through Microsoft Purview.