Use cases for saving Notes emails in SharePoint
One of the themes, which consistently comes up when meeting customers using our latest SharePoint Integrator version 1.5, is the business use cases for saving Notes emails in SharePoint. It became common wisdom that we are sending and receiving far too many emails and that there are better ways to collaborate and share information than inflating the Inbox of your colleagues, customers, and board members.
For example, since the Sarbanes-Oxley act and other similar regulations, every public company is required to establish an audit committee, which has to monitor important company transactions. Typically, the audit committee will include the company’s CFO as well as independent board members who are not company employees and do not have access to the company systems.
The traditional way to share information with your audit committee is to forward the emails relating to a transaction, which needs to be monitored. I talked to IT executives who said that complex transactions may include hundreds of emails with several documents attached to each email. As you can imagine, committee members' inboxes get inundated with emails, causing the members to become less responsive and less effective at monitoring and auditing the transaction.
A better way is to set up a secured SharePoint site that will be accessible by the audit committee members. A good practice is to create a folder for each transaction, which needs to be transparent to the committee. Then, using the SharePoint Integrator, you can drag-and-drop Notes emails related to the transaction to its document library. There is no need to send hundreds of emails to multiple commitee members and there is no need to install an e-mail client on your board members's computer. The members can set up an alert on SharePoint to get periodic updates and they don’t get flooded with emails. They can monitor the transaction and respond more effectively to the transaction events using this flexible collaboration methodology.
