In some organisations, emails are a weapon and may be held tightly like poker cards. Any boss appreciates the confidentiality of their email to HR or within the management team. However, most of the time, the lost email is a drain on productivity. To use a team sport metaphore: passing a ball that only some of your team can see, some of the time, is going to lead to a very frustrating game.
Benefits?
Exchange Vault means that you can share emails with the right people. Here are some examples:
- Team work: if not every day, then certainly every week, our helpdesk benefits because we can all see the email trail with each customer support case. This email linked to the support ticket is invaluable if you take a call from a client and the person who was dealing with the matter is away for a few days. Imagine the customer service gain as well.
- Audit trail: an auditor may quickly see what happened from the email history. Who reported the incident, what was done and when. We have many commercial clients who have used this facility for internal and external audit. In the public sector, the system has been invaluable for Reviews and Appeals during and after information governance cases for which the AXLR8 IRM is commonly used.
- Dropped balls: If you have had enough of ball game metaphores, this is the old problem of things dropping between the cracks. An action is required and there would normally be some evidence in the correspondence but there is none and the matter is not yet resolved. The benefit of being able to pick up the trail of some case or project that has been forgotten is so important as your organisation becomes leaner.
- Deletion of important mail: whether by accident or for deceit, a missing email within your team will put you at a disadvantage with a client or supplier.
- Reference: This is so important. Here are two examples:
- We have had an incident where the ExchangeVault was able to retrieve a contract from 7 years previously. The internal mail system had been changed twice since then and copied out to archives. There never was a paper copy. Not only did the document save us money but the client, upon reading it, recalled the deal and the details and was happy with the result. It might have otherwise destroyed the trust between the parties.
- One of our clients is a property company who had a multi-million pound contractual dispute. We were able to apply some third-party search tools to their MessageStore during the discovery process. Presentation of the emails showed complete transparency and put them at a huge advantage in court.
Confidentiality
Later, we will have some examples of case studies where we consider the privacy and confidentiality impact of multiple viewers of another colleague’s emails. In the meantime, consider NOT emailing your mum about that embarrassing condition on your work email!