People- vs. Project-Centric Email Workflow

Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 1, 2021 at 09:23 AM

It’s a fascinating problem, especially for small businesses without dedicated IT departments.

I looked into this at great length back in the early 2000s, and concluded that Novell GroupWise would indeed be the best all-round solution for this kind of requirement (a fundamental business requirement, in fact). Nothing else came close. But implementing GroupWise would have cost us an arm and a leg, so we used a combination of solutions in the end, including a powerful piece of Australian groupware that is now, alas, defunct. Now, of course, GroupWise is also defunct.

I have been amazed by the failure of IT developers to get a really user-friendly handle on this. There are solutions around for small businesses, but most of them focus on specific aspects (e.g. bookkeeping/accounting, document management, e-mail backups) with very limited cross-functional support. Larger businesses must turn to expensive consultants, first, to sell them the systems (and good luck with finding an “independent” consultant for that!) and second, to configure them so they work properly. This, based on chats with colleagues involved in IT, is by no means guaranteed to work; external consultants rarely understand internal processes as well as they pretend to (and in any case, are liable to select off-the-shelf configurations just to make their own lives easier).

User-friendly solutions that can be implemented by an SME are very thin on the ground. I can think of two that have impressed me recently: MarketCircle’s DayLite suite (https://www.marketcircle.com/), and the German solution Revolver (https://revolver.info/ – not available in English). Both of them, interestingly, are Mac-based, and in both cases, the pricing is pretty robust.

Of course there is a rapidly growing number of web apps that claim to be all-singing, all-dancing business management solutions – many of them fulfilling this promise by offering “integrations” with other (online) software. But many – I dare say most – SMEs are not delighted by the idea of running their entire business management operation through a third party, let alone multiple third parties. My Financial Director was appalled when it became apparent that to keep using QuickBooks, we were going to have to abandon the desktop app and use the (strikingly inferior) online version.

We’ve not found anything that suits us perfectly, which means we rely on shared group inboxes (something that IMAP servers are perfectly capable of, without any sophisticated additions – but you do have to trust everybody with access to a shared inbox) and a rigorously defined file system using set formulae for storing files; key project folders are synced using Datto Workspace (a very powerful Dropbox equivalent for businesses).

I haven’t found a perfect way to integrate e-mails – project-critical ones are generally printed out to the relevant project folders as PDFs, but it’s far from ideal. E-mails are automatically backed up to a centralised server, however, using MailStore (another outstanding German product with a fantastic search engine). This particular solution doesn’t run on Mac (more details at https://www.mailstore.com/); for a good Mac-based backup solution, you could do worse than Mail Backup X (http://inventpure.com/), but it’s not as good as MailStore.

Microsoft SharePoint I’ve experimented with, but like most MS “enterprise” products, it’s not SME-friendly (despite many avowals to the contrary); to use the online version, you have to sell your soul to Microsoft. Fair enough, you will say, but it’s not something I’m happy to do. I live in hope that a fully integrated SME-friendly solution will appear in the near future, and meanwhile keep an eye on DayLite, just in case they decide to moderate their pricing…

Cheers,
Bill