Transform Email into Actionable Information with Automated Email Management

Written by Joan Honig | Sep 10, 2020

Searching through a cluttered email inbox negatively affects productivity, stealing time and energy that could be put to better use. With automated email management as part of a document management system, email is efficiently indexed and archived so that it can be found quickly by keyword or fulltext search. You can also route email attachments for review and approval or send them directly to an associated project file.

It's time to automate email management if:

You have a hard time organizing your emails and following up on email-related tasks in an efficient way
You can’t access email history and attachments if a colleague is out of the office
You manually send and track important documents received by email, such as invoices, to multiple people for review
You spend too much time toggling between your email software, your document management system and third-party applications
You have no standard method for retrieving relevant email when it’s requested by auditors or needed for legal discovery
Your inbox is clogged with spam that you delete manually

Stop wasting time scrolling through email

With DocuWare Connect to Outlook you can:

Access all document management functions directly in Outlook
Make email accessible to authorized colleagues in a department or on a project team
Store messages with a mouse click automatically archiving email according to criteria you set
Enrich email messages with all necessary index data so they can be easily found and used to start digital workflow.
Mark email that you want to retain in Outlook as filed
Discard duplicates and meaningless standard messages according to parameters you define

To learn more about the value of automating email management, Watch the webinar, Get Your Email Handling in Shape with Agile Email Management Software.

When data access is business-critical

DocuWare customer, Marcon International Inc. integrated Outlook with DocuWare to make storing emails and attachments easier. The integration allows Marcon to automatically capture up to 50 percent of the fields that have to be indexed for information search and retrieval. “One of the best features of DocuWare is Connect to Outlook,” says Pat Hernandez, Chief Operating Officer. “It made emails and attachments easier for us to store.”

Marcon International specializes in transportation vessels including tugboats, barges, crew and supply vessels as well as ocean towing and smaller passenger ferries The company maintains a vast amount of information about vessels worldwide. Although only about 3,000 vessels are available for rental or sales at a given point, Marcon actively tracks about 17,000 vessels and barges. Marcon also retains information about 26,000 archived records on vessels that have gone off the grid. The company maintains a customer database of over 12,000 records. “Our business is data,” Hernandez says. “We do a lot of matching up and our clients range from single persons running a single vessel to some of the largest marine companies in the world.”

Getting control 460,000 emails each year

Another DocuWare customer, Beachcomber Tours, which is based in Mauritius, is a South African subsidiary of Beachcomber Resorts & Hotels. The award-winning tour operator has been booking package holidays to Mauritius for over 30 years, and consistently boasts the largest market share for sales among tour operators to the Indian Ocean island republic.

In just a few weeks, the DocuWare Professional Service Team adapted DocuWare Cloud to the Beachcomber Tours’ business processes in the Administration, Reservations and Group & Incentive departments. The complete legacy data in the file cabinet, including metadata, was also transferred to DocuWare – over 400,000 emails – then all other PDF and Office documents followed.

Today, DocuWare automatically archives all email from the general Outlook mailbox. This amounts to over 460,000 messages per year, often with attachments. Important information such as the sender’s details, the subject and the date are automatically scanned and transferred to index fields. The email is then transferred to the task list of the recipient – this is where individual messages are distributed to various departments within a workflow.

For inquiries about existing reservations, employees can also link the mails with a reservation number from the B.R.A.I.N.S. booking system. In this case, the messages can later be retrieved by using the DocuWare search engine for all correspondence that is linked to that B.R.A.I.N.S. number, so they appear together with all other information under the respective booking. If a customer contacts a consultant by telephone, any team member can assist the caller. Thanks to full access to the email correspondence, all consultants can assist quickly and competently.

With DocuWare Connect to Outlook email is managed together with documents related to a project or workflow process. This improves the organization of related content, such as project documentation and customer correspondence. Digital email management transforms email from a communication roadblock into an accessible information asset.

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