Union Square - ‘Best practice’ email management will ensure that
construction firms are able to combat the threat of legal action
Construction software specialist, Union Square
Software, has announced a Seven Step Guide to email
compliance for the construction industry. With email now
the de facto standard for communication within the
construction supply chain, management and retention of
contractually important email is becoming the crucial IT
issue facing construction firms in the UK.
Will Yandell, Director of Union Square, explains, “Many
contractual details are being agreed and confirmed in
email messages, so the growth in legal responsibilities
for looking after, and being able to produce, full email
audit trails has increased. In addition, as part of an
industry that works on a project basis, construction
firms store and retrieve information in a different way
to most other businesses. This means that standard
business tools – such as Microsoft Outlook – do not
always serve the best interests of the industry. In fact
Outlook provides possibly the worst place to store
contacts and emails.”
Yandell continues, “Email also causes procedural and
legal issues for managers, in deciding what exactly to
ask their staff to do when they receive or send an email
in order to preserve the message and its associated
audit trail and how to implement this policy.
Furthermore, the challenges for the IT department are
enormous. It has to ensure that all email is backed up
and does not get lost, not to mention the technical
issues of retrieving a specific message or set of
messages several years later.”
Union Square’s Seven Step Guide to Email Compliance
So, in practical terms, what can you do to protect your
organisation?
1. Don’t make end-users responsible for filing/archiving
emails. Take the responsibility out of their hands and
automate the entire process.
2. Make a decision to store EVERYTHING that is received
and sent by anyone in the organisation. That way you can
be sure nothing is lost.
3. Don’t use your email system as the filing/storage
repository for emails. Email systems were not (believe
it or not!) designed to be filing systems though more
often than not that is what they have become. How often
have you heard someone in your organisation complaining
about the email system having “run out of storage”?!
4. Use a SQL database to store the emails in their
native format. They are designed to deal with millions
of records and scale successfully. This is very
important as even small companies generate and receive a
significant volume of emails. Using a database can
significantly improve the speed of searching and can
also make integration with other aspects of your IT
strategy much easier e.g. linking emails with your
Customer Relationship Management system.
5. Make sure that once archived the emails cannot be
tampered with. It will be important later to show that
the email has been stored in its original form and not
tampered with.
6. The system should make it easy for end users to find
emails at a later date, for example by being able to
filter by project, or the sub-contractor who sent the
email or by a particular contact or a date range. Full
text searching should allow emails to be searched for
any content and attachments filed with them.
7. The system should facilitate the easier sharing of
knowledge and can be seen as part of a wider knowledge
management strategy. This may have particular value
within an activity such as a project where there will
definitely be some operational advantages in allowing
the entire team to see certain emails.
Email:
will.yandell@unionsquaresoftware.com
Arundel Jones Associates Ltd
Hill Farm, Linton Hill, Maidstone, Kent ME17 4AL
Tel : 01622 745333
news@buildingdesign.co.uk
Registered in England and Wales No. 07334149
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