There is no escaping the fact that email will continue to be a central part of our case management lifecycle. Likewise, Outlook is often considered one of the most critical business applications for most users.
In ShareDo, we offer various ways of working with email and Outlook, depending upon your individual work style.
- In volume environments, you can manage emails entirely within ShareDo, doing away with Outlook completely and managing all emails via team email addresses.
- You can manage emails in a hybrid manner, typically initiating email conversations from ShareDo and then “following” them up from Outlook while maintaining a single matter view.
This section overviews ShareDo's email management functionality and how it co-exists with Outlook and your email system. It describes the following.
- How you create emails within ShareDo.
- Monitoring of shared email boxes.
- Email lifecycle.
- Synchronising ShareDo key dates and appointments with Outlook.
Introductory video on email production
View the playlist on YouTube: Platform Deep Dive - ShareDoShow.
Creating Emails Within ShareDo
Just like document templates, you can create emails from the standard case Prepare menu if you use a template.
Or directly from a case participant.
Like document templates, email templates can be configured to have a wide variety of functionality, including content blocks, questionnaires and more – see Preparing a New Email Template.
The resultant email can either be sent automatically via workflows or will be presented to the ShareDo email editor.
Through this editor, you can:
- Select Matter parties to email to or add ad-hoc email addresses.
- Change or refresh the template.
- Manage where the resultant email will be stored in your DMS file structure.
- Quickly attach matter documents or standard attachments.
- Perform any task-related actions, such as delegating the email for someone else to author.
Depending upon your email work style, the email will be sent either from a shared team email address or from your personal account. In both cases, the sent email will be:
- Stored in the DMS.
- Tracked via a chronology entry, which is filterable by addressee.
- Appear in your sent items folder within Outlook.
- Appear in your Outbound emails folder.
- Additional cc or bcc participants may also be added to assist you in managing your email journey.
Monitoring Shared Email Boxes
Within ShareDo, you can monitor unlimited email boxes. Monitored email boxes will then pull emails into ShareDo.
When an email is brought into ShareDo, it will:
- Be created as a type of Task.
- Have a due date assigned to it.
- Be allocated to an individual or team based on allocation rules.
- Be automatically assigned to matter/work item.
- Match against document expectations if possible.
From the inbox view, users can:
- Manage emails – respond, and create related instructions or tasks.
- File the documents.
Monitored email boxes are configured through Admin -> Channels
See Configuring Email Monitoring.
Email Lifecycle
When an email is sent via ShareDo, a tracking reference is added. This tracking reference is configurable within the Channels feature.
This tracking reference is then used by ShareDo whenever an email is received into a monitored email box to file this email and its attachments to the correct Matter/Case and assign it to the relevant party.
Emails that cannot be correctly routed or belong to a team can be found in the team inbox view.
When an email is sent via ShareDo, a tracking reference is added; this enables the email to be routed to the correct person and case.
Since when managing emails in Outlook, it is highly desirable that you record this information within the Matter as well, you have 2 options:
- Cc in a monitored email address or Forward relevant emails to the monitored email address.
- Drag and drop emails into ShareDo.
Managing Appointments In Outlook
In a similar manner to emails, ShareDo enables you to configure the synchronisation of appointments, meetings and key dates between ShareDo and Outlook. This is defined at the system level and configured via OAuth for each user.
Key Dates and Appointments will then appear within Outlook.