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Companies with several members of staff
in a single department often struggle to manage their team emails
effectively.
Typically they find that inbound emails destined for accounts, the
technical helpdesk or even the complaints department are either not
being processed at all or being processed simultaneously by two
different users.
This article aims to clarify some of the options available to you
when using email as part of a team or as part of a business process
where several users require access to the same email messages.
However, please contact us if you wish to discuss your own
requirements in more detail.
Considerations:
According to your working practice,
different types of team could be envisaged. For example, a pool of
operators who are jointly responsible for responding to customer
complaints could be defined as ‘several equal members’. Whereas a
boss who needs to allow access for his assistant to read and reply
to emails on his behalf during his foreign business trips could be
defined as ‘one main member, one backup member’.
In both scenarios you need to consider how emails should be ‘marked
as read’ and how other members of the team will know when an action
has been taken or whether an action remains outstanding on an email. You
must also consider whether the creation of multiple copies of an
email is liable to cause confusion and whether team members require
the ability to ‘reply as’ somebody else (either their boss’s email
address or a generic shared mailbox address such as purchasing@abc.com).
Best practice in this
scenario suggests avoiding:
Publishing (or even
replying from) an individual’s email address:
• What happens if they are on
holiday or off sick?
• What happens if they leave the
organisation?
Creating
multiple uncontrolled copies of important documents:
• How can you tell who is dealing
with it?
• How can you be sure that it has
been processed?
The Exchange Server
approach:
Most organisations use Microsoft
Exchange Server (either on its own or as part of Windows Small
Business Server) to deliver their email and share calendar and
contact information with other network users.
Companies running Exchange Server may adopt the following three
approaches to configuring ‘team email’:
Distribution
Group -
emails sent to a generic email
address (distribution group) are copied to one or more users (e.g.
accounts@abc.com is duplicated and sent to both
tom@abc.com and harry@abc.com).
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