[Steve SpotOn]

We have a small office with 3 old iMacs running OS9 and Outlook Express, and 3 newer Mac's running OSX with Entourage.

We are all becoming increasingly reliant on e mail as our major communication tool with clients and suppliers. No longer do we write letters in Word, print out a spare copy and file them in a relevant folder. All gets left to the individual to create whatever filing system they see fit (if they do any at all) on their individual computer.

As well as a lack of system I am becoming increasingly concerned about managing and backing up data .... e.g. my boss on Outlook Express has now reached it's capacity of approx 2gig and can't download any e mail unless he deletes old messages. If I archive his current 'Identity' he will have to start again with an empty program and accessing his old e mails is nearly impossible. I believe Entourage has a much higher limit but still encodes all the messages into a database that can't be slectively archived/deleted.

I've read with interest this article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5116416.stm

What methods do you all use for managing/backing up/e mail.... what does the future hold for storing all our company data safely????

TIA

Steve

[peeb]

Originally Posted by Steve SpotOn

We have a small office with 3 old iMacs running OS9 and Outlook Express, and 3 newer Mac's running OSX with Entourage.

We are all becoming increasingly reliant on e mail as our major communication tool with clients and suppliers. No longer do we write letters in Word, print out a spare copy and file them in a relevant folder. All gets left to the individual to create whatever filing system they see fit (if they do any at all) on their individual computer.

As well as a lack of system I am becoming increasingly concerned about managing and backing up data .... e.g. my boss on Outlook Express has now reached it's capacity of approx 2gig and can't download any e mail unless he deletes old messages. If I archive his current 'Identity' he will have to start again with an empty program and accessing his old e mails is nearly impossible. I believe Entourage has a much higher limit but still encodes all the messages into a database that can't be slectively archived/deleted.

I've read with interest this article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5116416.stm

What methods do you all use for managing/backing up/e mail.... what does the future hold for storing all our company data safely????

TIA

Steve

Frankly this is less of a technology question, and more of a question about what records your company needs to keep and for what purpose and how long. You need to figure out a policy for how long you will keep what information, and set some procedures for doing this. Some information, like finance, will be dictated by tax more than anything, others by clients needs etc. Once you have this, come back with the requirements, and we can help you find the right tech solution. Yours, Peeb

[Steve SpotOn]

Sorry I rambled on a bit in my initial post.
What I'm looking for is an e mail application that lets us archive off folders of e mails, but also gives us the chance to bring those back in at a future date. We mostly do keep our e mails in relevant client/supplier/project folders within Outlook and Entourage. But as projects finish we would like to archive those folders, keeping our e mail application to just the current clients/suppliers/projects.
But we also need the flexibility to easily bring those e mails back in for whatever reason.

At the moment in Outlook and Entourage all the information is contained in a single database file - you can't extract/import folders or files easily.

TIA

Steve

[ism]

Steve, why not just create a new Outlook data file for each new project?