With the entire email dialogue available directly within your SharePoint Portal, you can improve the quality of the collaborative processes, because you and your colleagues know exactly what has been exchanged with a specific Business Partner.

Email-Manager™ for MOSS comes with a fully functional Web Part where relevant emails are displayed.

This web part can be customized to occupy a small part of the display or all of it. Alternatively, it can be initiated as a pop-up window and basically customized to fit transparently into your current enterprise workflow.

Features and benefits:

Email-Manager™ for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, specifically offers the following functionality:

• Automatic capture of incoming and outgoing emails on Microsoft Exchange

• Safe and verbatim storage of emails in Microsoft SQL Server

• Indexing of key parts of the emails – for fast search and retrieval

• Automatic addition of selected metadata

• User notification system, that allows for manual addition of metadata

• Automatic, semi automatic or manual tagging of emails for collaboration – based on preferences

• Automatic tagging of private and confidential emails for non collaboration

• Exposure of shared emails via a web part in MOSS 2007

• Full support for role based security

• Extensible Web Services platform based on Microsoft .NET

The Email-Manager™ Components

Email-Manager™ is a set of .NET based services that consists of the following main components:

• A Mail Server Capture Agent that monitors one or more mailboxes on your Mail Server for incoming and outgoing emails. A Capture Agent for Microsoft Exchange Server has already been developed – and additional Capture Agents (e.g. for Lotus Notes or Novell GroupWise) can be provided by Opportunity Solutions or its development partners.

• A central Email-Manager™ Database that contains verbatim copies of the emails from the monitored mailboxes – as well as metadata supplied by the users. The users can add metadata to the Email-Manager Database using the Email-Manager™ Core Technologies [EMMCT] Notification Services, which is an optional component.

• A Database Abstraction Layer that is the interfaces between the underlying Email-Manager™ Database and the rest of the system. The Database Abstraction Layer can be changed, depending of the database technology of your choice. A Database Abstraction Layer for Microsoft SQL Server has already been developed – and additional Database Abstraction Layers (e.g. for Oracle or IBM DB2) can be provided by Opportunity Solutions or its development partners.

• The Email-Manager™ Core that handles the central logic – such as validation, monitoring, security and indexing.

• An Application Abstraction Layer that acts as the interface between the Email-Manager system and your CRM/ERP/Portal infrastructure. The Application Abstraction Layer comes will a full SDK – allowing you integrate EMMCT with your existing infrastructure.  The Application Abstraction Layer, in turn, interfaces with two additional EMMCT components (the two bullets below). An Application Abstraction Layer for Microsoft CRM has already been developed, but you will be able to make one yourself using the SDK.

• The Master Contact Database is typically your existing CRM system. EMMCT uses the Master Contact Database to match emails captured by the Capture Agent, with contact records in the CRM system. The Master Contact Database could be a CRM system, an ERP system or any other system holding your contact information. If specific security settings (or other policies) have been set for individual contacts in the Master Contacts Database, EMMCT will adhere to these and ensure that emails can not be viewed by individuals that have not been granted access.

• The Presentation Layer - which is typically embedded directly into your CRM-, ERP-, or Portal-systems - displays a complete list of emails that has been sent to or received from the contact in question. Just as with the Master Contact Database, you will be able to develop an Application Abstraction Layer that interfaces with a Presentation Layer of your choice. Typically, the Master Contact Database and the Presentation Layer will be the same (normally the CRM system) - but you could in fact have more than one Presentation Layer at the same time. This could happen if you wanted to display the customer email dialog both from within e.g. your CRM system and your Intranet.

• The EMMCT Management Console.  This is the administrators’ dashboard, delivered as a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) Snap-In. From within this console you can configure the Capture Agent, user access control, privacy settings, etc.
  

Adding the Email-Manager™ Web Part (click image to see full size)

Site with the Web Part integrated (click image to see full size) 


 

Optional User Notification System [UNS]

The UNS comes standard with the EMMCT system. If it is NOT activated, every email sent to – or received from – contacts in the Master Contact Database, will be displayed inside the Presentation Layer. If an email has been sent/received – and was not supposed to be displayed – the user will have to go to the Presentation Layer, locate the email, right-click on it – and choose “delete”.

If it IS activated, the user will have a small notification window displayed on-screen when an email is sent/received – very much like the Outlook 2003 notification window. Via this notification window, the user has a one-click access to decide whether the email should be displayed inside the Presentation Layer or not. Also, using the notification window, the user can add metadata to the email – such as connecting it to a certain project, add categories, etc.

Sample User Notification Window

Behind the scenes: Full email compliance

Even if the UNS has been activated - and the users choose not to display certain emails in the Presentation Layer – these are still being copied to the Email-Manager™ Database. As it happens, EVERY email that is received by or sent from a mailbox that is being monitored by the Capture Agent will be copied to the Email-Manager™ Database, via the Email-Manager™ Core. This includes private emails, internal emails and emails not connected to records in the Master Contact Database. This functionality allows for full email compliance – as demanded by initiatives such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II and HIPAA. It is important to understand, however, that it is only the system administrator that has access to these emails. To this end, they are not available to the users inside the Presentation Layer.

For further information – please contact sales@oppsol.com