Is email the right tool for this task? Alternative suggestions please.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mark
  • Start date Start date
M

Mark

In my company I have a fairly large (internationally distributed)
group. They expend a lot of time and energy collaborating over the
production of very complex and important documents. It is important
that they can all read the docs, circulate comments about the docs,
revise the docs and keep track of the revisions.

At the moment they are using email and store their individual
histories with different versions of the file in personal folders
within Outlook. The problems are:

Huge volume of email.
Difficult to access this data when travelling (via modem).
Difficult to keep track of versions.
Difficult to keep track of comment message thread.
Insecure storage of docs on local hard drive (mostly laptop based) and
reliant on user to make backups to network.

Don't get me wrong: I love email. I just think there has to be
something else that's better suited to these tasks.

Any advice or suggestions greatly appreciated.
 
Email is not the right tool. You need some kind of document management
system. There are lots to choose from with different feature sets. You might
start by evaluating the combination of Outlook 2003 with Windows SharePoint
Services, a free component for Windows 2003. The two together support very
useful "document workspaces" that do version tracking and check-in/out and
allow a separate discussion forum outside the document itself.
 
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