Must-have features for an email filing solution
Written by James Allchin on May 19, 2010 – 12:57
We’re confident that we have email filing features that blow customers minds. We’re also heavily geared up to dealing with the kinds of volumes of emails that lawyers deal with on a daily basis. This is no easy task. But with our background in the legal sector working for magic circle law firms we’re confident we’ve gone a long way to solving this.
This got me thinking so I decided to come up with a list of “must-haves” that need to be included in an email filing solution for it to be successful in a high-volume email environment like the legal sector. So here we go…
1. Dynamically maintain a list of recent matters and favourite matters to make selection of matter an easy task, ideally this should also be linked with the billing system
2. Once an email is filed (e.g. a new email or an email from a client) – all subsequent replies, forwards must be automatically filed – removing the burden on the end user
3. The filing system should automatically suggest where the email should be filed even if a completely new email – ultimately the system should learn patterns of email addresses and content within the emails. This again reduces the filing burden to the end user.
4. The filing process must add value to the end user. This is absolutely key – if there is no added benefit to the Lawyer for filing the email, then even if it’s a compliance requirement, it is unlikely to be adopted. There should be benefits – for example the KnowledgeMill solution helps the lawyer fill out their timesheet based on what they have filed to. It also provides analytical intelligence to within the matter which are useful on a daily basis.
5. The filing process must de-duplicate emails so that when the same email is filed by different lawyers on different email servers, there is only one copy displayed. Traditional document management solutions simply don’t do this. Lawyers are faced with 1000s of duplicates. Our solution does this. A single central source of truth for an email.
6. The underlying filing system must be performant. If the process to view the filed emails is slow – then Lawyers will immediately turn off and reject the platform. The UIs need to be as close to Outlook performance as possible.
7. The filing mechanism must NOT lock up Outlook. The lawyer should be able to file 1000s and 1000s of emails in one go. Many email filing solutions lock and hang for huge periods of time – effectively wasting precious working hours. Our background filing mechanism avoids lock-ups. This is absolutely essential.
This is just a starter for 10, we’d love to hear your ideas or even your frustrations with your existing solutions!
Removing the burden on the user should also be balanced out by removing the burden on the administrator supporting the user. If your product can manage this, then you are really on to something. In my experience, many “user friendly” applications mean hours of work and hair-pulling for the poor unseens trying to maintain the system.
Hi Adam,
We’re heavily focused on the admin side as well. The underlying ContextStore platform is available in a number of forms – notably a turnkey solution (on top of Linux or Windows), a virtual appliance, a hosted private cloud offering and a hosted public cloud offering. We’ve spent a lot of time getting the installation to be as simple as possible but also the administration to be straight forward, no nonsense and reliable.
The whole platform is configured and controlled through a single central UI called the ContextStore Manager (CSM for short) which is actually a Rich Internet Application implemented in Silverlight. It’s very intuitive (I can send you a video if you’re interested) and provides a single point of access for Administrators to do everything they need to do.
We offer a number of really cool advanced features such as ILM (with the unique ability to be based on business policies) and HSM (with out of the box integration to common file storage over DAS, SAN, iSCSI etc… but also to proprietary CAS devices such as Centerra and Atmos).
Another neat thing is that the ContextStore platform is entirely accessible and configurable through a single set of RESTful web services APIs. This means that you can build your own apps which expose ContextStore content (we build ALL our Apps against the same API layer) and you can integrate very easily with 3rd party systems.
Given that all interaction with the platform is done over HTTP(S) we’re very geared up to cloud or hosted deployments but also for integrating to hosted or cloud based MS exchange environments. This is why we’re very easily able to provide compatibility with services such as MS BPOS.
Other key features from an Admin perspective is full integration with Active Directory for very simple straightforward user provisioning and authentication.
Do you work on the administration side of things?
Cheers
James
mail management is a serious chore, so lets hope that this will be a real catch-all solution
you talk about the must haves but as i am not in the legal sector, i leave this expertise to you “smile” . the buzz for new products is the concept of its great idea , the game changer which makes a product unique compared to everthing else on the market as talked about in this article http://angryweasel.com/blog/?p=142 . what is your game changer that puts your product above other archiving solutions out there ?
Hi James.
I’m an Exchange and Messaging systems admin. I wish I had the power to get rid of our present email wreaking solution but I don’t. All the decisions for our UK office solutions come from the US and our America-centric decision makers are unwilling to consider local solutions no matter how good they are.
It is good to know that when I am in a position to contribute to or lead these decisions, there are systems out there that are viable alternatives to the sorry excuse for archiving we use right now.