The Great Email Conundrum

(or to store or not to store, that is the question)

Email. Love it or hate it, email is the primary source of business communication today with content ranging from confirming the completion of major business deals to checking what time your associates are off to lunch!

Before you dismiss this article as ‘just another marketing tool’, perhaps it is worth considering what your email and (perhaps more specifically) the content within those emails is doing for your organisation as well as whether you are handling that content properly.

In this post-Covid business world of geographically dispersed workforce, the ability to direct, share and ensure appropriate actions on any piece of communication received in the organisation is paramount. Add on top of this the various regulations regarding the safeguarding of PII (personally-identifiable information), retention of pertinent data for regulators, meeting request deadlines... the potential time to manage just one business email can look daunting. When the average office worker apparently receives more than 120 emails and sends roughly 40 each day, the time just managing that communication stream soon stacks up. Of course you then have specialist mailboxes driving business process - orders, quotations, consultations, invoicing - a continuous stream of data that needs to be managed.

This is where implementing an email capture solution integrated into a DMS (document management system) can really help your business processes. Through either email client or direct mailbox integration, email can be indexed, categorised, assigned, audited, retrieved and managed securely in your DMS. Once stored, that email can be retrieved as part of a project review, become the basis of sales team task workflow, create a customer services query or instruct the accounts team to process a payment:

• Immediately secured (against loss)
• Immediately shared with the wider organisation (available from anywhere)
• Immediately audited (views, changes, duplications all tracked from the moment it enters the DMS)
• Immediately controlled (available to the right employees and secured against unwanted access or duplication)
• Immediately able to drive process (trigger workflows, notifications, data transfers, payments without manual intervention)

All part of the digital transformation process - looking at patterns (processes) in your organisation and looking at how they might benefit from conversion to digital and process automation.

Here at PacSol, we can supply and support a range of solutions depending on your organisation's needs and what platform(s) are already available to you (first rule of change – start from where you are!) If email is on your mind, then please talk to us about your ideas (big or small) but in the meantime, here is a brief overview of the main options currently available through PacSol:

PacSol’s IEP (Inbound Email Processor) is a highly configurable, platform independent application developed to run on IBM i, Linux and Windows server platforms.

Compatible with a wide range of email sources, the IEP application can be tailored to the requirements of any business. IEP can monitor multiple mailboxes and apply custom import processing rules to each source. IEP also has highly configurable options around attachment content handling and exclusion rules based on type and size to handle content such as signature images.

The IEP’s output stage can be tailored for a wide range of scenarios, for example storing new content directly to PacSol’s ImageView platform, ingestion into third party document management platforms (such as DocuWare), or simply submitting the processed items to a shared drive.

DocuWare supports both a Microsoft Outlook plugin for the direct index by a user to the DocuWare platform and automated IMAP / Exchange mailbox integration which can be combined with workflow for task management. This is an additional module to the DocuWare on-premise platform or included with DocuWare Cloud.

Invu supports both a Microsoft Outlook plugin for the direct index by a user to the Invu platform and automated IMAP mailbox integration which can be combined with workflow for task management. This is an additional module to the Agilico INVU on-premise platform

PacSol's Pulse supports Outlook integration for either on demand individual or folder level index to the content management platform. This tool is highly configurable and is designed to work with a wide range of repositories.

Kofax (Now Tungsten Automation) Email Server supports the automated capture of email from an IMAP / Exchange mailbox and then further identification / recognition process before release to the configured content management platform. This is an additional module to the Kofax Capture platform.

IBM Datacap Email integration supports the automated capture of email from an IMAP / Exchange mailbox and then further identification / recognition process before release to the configured content management platform. This is an optional  module on the IBM Datacap platform.

Toby Gilbertson, Director of Operations. January 2024

(updated from an original article published July 2020)

#pacsoluk #emailprocessing #email #documentcapture #documentmanagement