Email hell to email heaven

The Lanarkshire Valuation Joint Board (LVJB) was established in 1996 by North and South Lanarkshire Councils, and is vested with the functions of valuing property for rent and rates and also compiling the electoral roll. Like most organisations, LVJB look back nostalgically to a time when all documents were created on paper. To communicate, they wrote letters or sent memos, which were then filed systematically alongside other documents, so that everything could be easily found at a later date. With systematic filing, if you know where you have put something, someone else knows where to find it. With the advent of fax and then email people became overwhelmed.

Since the inception of LVJB they have seen a huge increase in email and electronic documentation; so much so that, like most organisations, they were feeling the strain of ‘inbox overload’.

The knock-on effects of this are enormous: project management, communication and teamwork suffer, data is rendered inaccessible by people taking important files with them in their laptops on business trips or when they leave the organisation, people make multiple copies of large attachments wasting storage space and undermining established QA procedures. Unnecessary printing wastes paper and filing space.

All of this lead LVJB to look for a way of filing emails and documents in a simple and intuitive way, but one that still allows individuals to access emails and documentation easily. The answer came while attending a local Government email seminar in London, where they saw a presentation on Mail Manager.

Mail Manager simplifies and speeds up the process of filing, finding and sharing emails. It is an Outlook plug-in which helps towards the goal of a paperless office by making it simple to file emails and documents in one place. If people have efficient tools and processes, their tendency to hoard their own copies or print documents is reduced. Mail Manager also frees up storage space on the email server, which reduces the demand for newer hardware and thus the endless disposal of old hardware to landfill. Furthermore, Mail Manager ensures compliance with data retention legislation while simultaneously enabling staff easily to maintain their mailbox sizes below imposed limits. It adapts to each user, giving a customised shortlist of suggested filing locations based on previous behaviour, making it quick and easy to decide where to save messages.

After an initial trial of Mail Manager, LVJB purchased 76 licences and it has become integral to their overall information management strategy. Gary Bennett at LVJB said, “Oasys Mail Manager has sharpened our QA procedures by ensuring that relevant documents, whether spreadsheets, reports or email, can be kept in one place under a pre determined structured filing system making them easier to retrieve. This has improved our overall approach to information management in terms of the dissemination of information throughout the organisation, as well as expediting the processes involved in document retrieval, whilst cutting down on the number of copies of documents being circulated at any one time.”

For a free 30 day trial or to find out more go to: www.oasys-software.com/mailmanager
Telephone: +44 (0)191 238 7559
Email: oasys@arup.com
Website: www.oasys-software.com/mailmanager