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Document & Email Management System
The right Document & Email Management System is crucial for law firms of any size. But finding just what you need isn’t always easy. Your IT provider can help you find the legal-centric solution that will work best for you. In the meantime, we’ve provided information here that can help you with your choice.
Start With Solutions To Prevent Email Troubles
Email uptime is critical to law firms today. You depend on receiving time-sensitive information from the courts via email. If your email goes down or is inaccessible, you can miss extremely important deadlines. Thankfully there are solutions your IT provider can implement to prevent headaches from email downtime.
Use Microsoft Office 365. We utilize Microsoft Office 365 with Datto Backupify and Barracuda cloud spam filter to rectify this. Office 365 is cloud-based and has all the redundancy of the Cloud. Even if your office is offline, you can still receive emails via your mobile devices.
Backupify for Office 365. Backupify backs up your Office 365 if there’s a failure or your data is corrupted with a virus like CryptoLocker ransomware. CryptoLocker is one of the strongest and most devastating computer viruses in history, and it strikes by literally holding your computers hostage.
- Backupify recovers accidentally or maliciously deleted Office 365 data fast.
- It prevents data from being deleted by former employees or deprovisioned licenses.
- It’s used to guard against Office 365 application outages, failed 3rd-party integrations or ransomware attacks.
- It maintains control of your company data that you’ve been entrusted to protect.
Barracuda SPAM Filter. This will store up-to-date emails in a secure cloud and resubmit them if there is ever an outage. That way, they won’t get bounced.
It also verifies that email links are going to credible sites. So, if an email with a malicious link does get through the spam filter, it performs another scan of the link when you click on it before it redirects you.
Look For These Key Features In Any Document & Email Management System
- Email Management Capabilities: A good Document Management System should also include an Email Management System. You should be able to save emails to your matter right from Outlook, so you can easily search email messages and attachments, and access data such as the sender, recipient, and a timestamp.
- Integrates With Microsoft Office: You should be able to save a document or email to your Document & Email Management System right from Microsoft Office, and also save your Microsoft Word documents directly to a matter from within Word. It should also integrate with Microsoft Outlook so you can simply drag and drop emails to a matter without leaving your inbox.
- Cloud-Based Solution: This provides the anywhere/any time access you need. It’s also scalable, flexible and economical. You don’t need to pay upfront for an on-premise system. With a cloud-based Document & Email Management System, you pay according to the number of employees who use it.
- Matter-Centric: Any Document & Email Management System for attorneys should be matter-centric. This means all of your documents, emails, and files will be organized according to matters and can be found from one place.
- Security & Permissions: You should be able to assign permissions for each of your users, along with what they can or can’t do with the system. It’s always best to assign permissions on a need-to-know basis, and according to the job employees perform. For example, your receptionist might not need to have access to certain documents or emails.
- Fast Search & Index: You need to be able to search and locate any document or email instantly. A good Document & Email Management System will index each document and email, including its contents, so you can find what you need in a matter of seconds.
- Versioning Capabilities: Look for a Document & Email Management System that keeps a copy of every document’s version when changes are made. It should also track and record who made changes and when. You need to be able to access this information at any time quickly.
- Check-In/Check-Out Function: This is a basic function for any Document Management System. When you check out a document, it should mark it as “in use,” so others won’t make changes while you’re working on it. This also creates a history of who made what changes and when.
- Faxing & Scanning Integration: You must be able to scan documents directly into your Document & Email Management System. This saves you the time and trouble of uploading and organizing scanned documents. Your System should also act like an inbox for incoming faxes, where they can be stored directly into the right folders.
- Metadata & Notes: Two fundamental components of any Document & Email Management System are notes and metadata. Metadata is any additional information that’s not stored in a document but tells you about that document. This way, you and your staff can make internal comments and notes, along with categorization entries for each document.
- Audit Trails: This tells you who changed a document last, what updates they made, when they made them and more. Any good Document & Email Management System will provide this function.
- Deadlines: It’s a given that your firm will face deadlines. The right Document & Email Management System will let you assign deadlines to documents stored anywhere in the solution. And you should be able to view an aggregate of document deadlines via a dashboard or report.
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Further reading
ICS is a Texas-based 40-year-old technology company specializing in Managed IT, VoIP, Video Conferencing and Video Surveillance solutions for US and International businesses. ICS has over 4000 regional installations and specializes in multi-site businesses between 25 and 2500 employees. ICS’s customers enjoy the experience of ICS’s Total Care program which provides clients flat fee services with obsolescence and growth protection. Whether a customer elects to deploy their IT, Video Conferencing or VoIP in the cloud or on the customer’s premise, ICS can provide a full turn-key solution for our clients under one flat monthly fee.