Member Article

Much ado about nothing on mail archiving?

Arup engineers have already got – and are happy to share – the solution. Lawyers often remind us all of the need to keep business and project related email for at least six years, in case the business is called upon to retrieve and present data to the Court. Earlier this month Ian Birdsey of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said that organisations should consider retaining the information for longer than the accepted norm of six years in order to be able to appropriately respond to electronic disclosure, or e-discovery, requests stemming from disputes arising outside of the UK.

He went on to quote suggestions that it might take a firm 12 working days to retrieve relevant email That, at least, was a surprise to Arup software developers at Oasys Software, whose commercially available Outlook add-on Mail Manager could achieve that instantly.

With most cloud-storage and project-sharing tools, the focus for email is still on storage and back up rather than retrieval – which misses the point that email traffic also has real value during a project, the core driver behind the development of Mail Manager. With data storage costs no longer a major barrier to back up, the debate has move on:“ it is no longer a case of whether or what to back up, but how to back up, “ said Alec Milton, managing director of Oasys Software.

The real costs to business are likely to arise in getting data into a secure repository in the first place and then finding and retrieving the appropriate data should there be a call for e-discovery in the course of a commercial dispute. Yet it doesn’t have to be that way, as Oasys Software has demonstrated.

The Oasys answer, developed in response to pleas from Arup engineers working on major projects across the globe, comes in the form of a simple and inexpensive Outlook add-on. It takes minutes to install and minutes to learn to use, yet it provides all the tools necessary to ensure that all relevant incoming and outgoing email is saved in the right place, in standard email message format on a shared and secure system folder and alongside other related documents such as reports, spreadsheets and presentations. This gives all authorised team members – wherever they are located - access to all email data and attachments during the project and makes archiving afterwards very straightforward.

Impressive faceted search tools drill down to individual messages instantly, even when very loose search criteria are used, both during the working phase of the project and after the files have been archived.

There is also now, in the latest release of Mail Manager, a social mapping tool that with a single mouse click visualises email traffic within a team, providing a useful window on team dynamics and effectiveness. This can be really helpful in visualising who the key players are, whether there are islands of disconnected communication and who really owns the relationship with a client. Mail Manager does not affect a user’s personal email traffic – it simply prompts them (or compels them if the system administrator so wishes) to save relevant email in the right system folders, which may or may not be shared with other team members , depending on security. It also learns from your behaviours and will recommend where to file based on previous experience.

“Mail Manager makes sure the information is saved, shared and retrievable forever “, said Alec Milton.

James Galpin, Partner with UK architects HazleMcCormackYoung LLP comments: “We have been in the unfortunate position of having to be expert witnesses on one of our completed projects and the use of Mail Manager made finding relevant records a fast and intuitive process. The software saved weeks of work in that instance alone.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lynne M East .