The Use of Mail Manager at John McCall Architects

John McCall Architects have enjoyed almost eighteen years of design focused architectural work. They have been involved in providing a wide range of architectural design solutions in the North West of England, which includes; Social Housing, Area & Urban Regeneration, Private houses, Community Buildings, Interior Design work and Office refurbishment, new Churches and community facilities.

Like most architectural practices email is used extensively on all projects as the preferred method of written communication. This brings with it a number of issues when a project can have hundreds or even thousands of emails relating to it.

For some time we have been very aware that email is both a critical communication medium and record keeping problem. A couple of years ago we decided that we needed to have a better way of keeping email in a job based filing system. We used Outlooks Public Folders to do this in the first instance, but this was never considered to be a satisfactory solution. As part of our ISO 9001 QA research we recognised that it is very difficult to manage email and to ensure that copies of all critical email is actually stored correctly. Along with this, multiple copies of emails were being stored, which makes the finding of email a bit more complicated when searching back for historical documents.

JMA are involved with the University of Salford in a Knowledge Transfer Partnership which is designed to apply Lean Process management principles to the working of the practice. As part of this we looked at rationalising the way that we deal with email communications. We looked at several different options, most of which seemed to provide solutions that were over complex. Having tested Oasys Mail Manager across the practice we decided that it provides a simple, robust and effective means of dealing with email. The files become part of the project data, stored on the NAS drive data server. The outcome is transparent and gives us:

• good security
• the ability to back up and archive projects with all data included in a single package
• and provides the comfort that the email messages are easily found

Colin Usher, Director at John McCall Architects