People- vs. Project-Centric Email Workflow

Posted by Ken
Nov 30, 2021 at 03:50 PM

Paul Korm wrote:
@Ken, I have worked at implementing very large M365 (nee O365)
>installations in government—I assume that is what your agency is
>running on. The short story is that the underlying infrastructure to do
>what you want to do is there. M365 has very robust tools and metadata
>that can be used to mark the data (emails, documents, messages, etc.) in
>multiple ways. You might want to look into, for example, the advanced
>e-discovery features of M365.
> >Specifically on the creation and management of project mailboxes—that
>is a very common approach that is accomplished with group mailboxes.
>Many agencies settle on a naming convention for these mailboxes, and
>they need administrator(s), but you should be able to find plenty of use
>cases describing that in the public domain. We considered group
>mailboxes—for projects, or deparments, or other non-personal uses—
>as a way to avoid storing email with institutional importance in
>personal mailboxes that later get abandoned when the inevitable
>retirement or resignation occurs.
> >If you can get your technical staff involved with users in a
>conversation with your agency’s Microsoft technical account team, you
>will probably be able to work toward a solution. One interesting thing
>is that a lot of the security and data administration underpinnings of
>O/M365, from a user perspective, were designed with a heavy hand from
>Microsoft’s legal departments. If anyone knows the value and
>challenges of lost data, it is the legal team.

Yes, you have described our setup pretty well. I do sit on a working group for technology implementation, so I do have some access to mid-level staff who can help me shape up a possible proposal. Ironically, we had originally outsourced our archive software when we moved to Outlook to meet our legal retention requirements, but that is a whole other story. So, I believe that MS is handling some of our current retention features. I just need to find a user-friendly way of getting project files to a common project repository, most likely in SP with a Teams front end that meets approval. It is not going to be an easy sell, but with some background research here, at least I will hopefully not be barking up the wrong tree.

Thanks,

—Ken