Mail Manager Collections

Mail Manager

Mail Manager Collections - How they work

Overview

Collections provide an easy way to centrally manage the filing locations and your users see in their copy of Mail Manager. For example you can maintain a list of client folders and whenever it changes, the team will automatically be updated.

Collections put you in control and remove the hassle of maintaining consistency across the team/office or business. You can have as many collections as you want and can keep them wherever you choose although our recommendation is that you keep them all in one folder.

The source of each filing location is shown in the 'Collection' column of the filing dialogue

The user experience

Mail Manager allows you to add personal filing locations to your own lists, these are maintained in a local MDB file. This is recommended for personal filling locations but business ones are best maintained centrally and shared across all who need them. So if you add a new client, everyone will see that and nobody can inadvertently file to the wrong location.

Managing collections

The Collections Manager lists the collections that you have loaded. Each one can be either on or off. Locations in a collection that are turned on are available for both filing and searching, those that are off are not available for either. This can be useful if you have to do some work for another office as you can load their collection and when you are no longer working with it, you can turn their one off.

Collections enable easy central management, so we recommend that you place them somewhere central that is accessible by all the staff that will use them and that you adjust the Windows file or folder permissions so that only a select group of people can edit them.

Collection Editor

The collections editor provides a fast and easy way to add or edit locations either one at a time or en-mass. We recommend that you become familiar with it's features such as drag & drop as these can save a lot of effort.

Within 30 seconds of you saving your changes all users that are connected to the network will be updated.

Note: Locations are updated in each user's local MDB so that they are available for filing when off-line.

Collections.txt

Collection.txt is a simple but powerful text file. We recommend that you become familiar with its capabilities as it is key to easy management. We also recommend that you set the Windows file or folder permissions so that only a select group of people can edit it.

A quick edit of this file enables you to push collections out to all users, setting them to be initially on or off, or remove collections from all machines when you need to retire them. More importantly you can ensure that your centrally created locations take precedence over user created ones by using the "remove local locations" feature. This allows you to delete user's "personal" locations if they match certain criteria. For example you might have a collections file listing all your client folders which are subfolders of \\server4\clients\. Adding \\server4\clients\% to the [remove local locations] section of the collections.txt file will delete any 'personal' locations that start with this path, ensuring that staff can only use the ones you are offering.

Note: To take advantage of collection.txt each instance of Mail Manager needs to know where to look for it, this can be set in the installer prior to deployment (see documentation on MSIconfigure.exe)

Creating a collection from a backup

If you have been using an earlier version of Mail Manager and have the filing locations already defined but in your 'personal' list there is an easy way to export these and use them as the starting point for a new collection file. Mail Manager backup files share the same format as collections but have a different file extension (.mmbackup and .mmcollection respectively). Follow the documented procedures to export your list to a .mmbackup file and then rename it to .mmcollection. You can then load the collection via the collection manager.