By combining leading cloud storage with email — organizations can benefit from a powerful solution for email collaboration
Across organizations of all sizes are shared email accounts. These email accounts have addresses like “sales@“ (sales), “hr@“ (human resources), “ap@“ (accounts payable), etc. These accounts are an important staple in offices around the world, because they help separate communication of a specific function from individual users. When disassociated from a user, not only are key emails not mixed up with other non-related messages, but are unaffected by the natural employee turn-over of the organization.
Despite the need of shared email accounts to better centralize and manage communications, these accounts are cumbersome to deploy and operate. To start with shared email accounts need to be accessible across collaborators. This means that users need to add these accounts to their email client (ex. Outlook). Not all email clients easily support the adding of additional accounts and each email client has a different configuration process. A user wanting to extend a shared account to a mobile device will need to figure out how that is done. Furthermore, these shared accounts can grow very large over time. A large, shared account can significantly impact the performance of a user’s Outlook. But the biggest disadvantage of shared email accounts is the limited tools email provides for collaboration. Email was never designed for securely sharing a single copy of content. Sharing in email is giving new copies of the message and its attachments to other people, not working collaboratively over an original document. As such, email has long been a source of data sprawl, a security threat, a governance nightmare and a productivity drain. Email was designed nearly 50 years ago. More modern, purpose built collaboration technologies, such as cloud storage (ex. Box, Egnyte, Google Drive, OneDrive), offer a much better collaboration model.
Technologies, like mxHero, help bridge the gap between email and cloud storage. MxHero allows companies to create an email alias that saves messages directly to leading cloud storage services. The email address can continue to be the same “sales@“ or “ap@“, but instead of saving messages in a cumbersome and insecure email account, the email and its contents go directly to cloud storage. Furthermore, advanced classification capabilities from MxHero, allow messages to be automatically sorted to the correct folders. For example, a leading regional bank uses mxHero to automatically save loan applications sent as email attachments to a specific email address. MxHero strips off the attached loan applications, classifies them by applicant and saves them to an applicant specific folder in the bank’s cloud storage.
Once in cloud storage email collaboration becomes far better than when in legacy shared email accounts. In cloud storage, the benefits include:
no need to complicate user email accounts by adding multiple addresses. Users access shared cloud storage folders — no need for email configurations;
secure access to emails and their attachments can be finely controlled with flexible permissions — limit access to view only (no download), time limit viewing to a few days, audit access to email records, revoke access at anytime …
chat and comment over emails without the need to forward messages back and forth in confusing email threads
options to leverage powerful search, workflow engines, AI and metadata capabilities of best of breed cloud storage services.
Just to mention a few of the many benefits of leading cloud storage services!
Email is robust and ubiquitous but also a legacy technology poorly adapted for many of the needs of today’s organizations. Cloud storage is designed for today. With the help of innovative technologies companies can leverage the best of both worlds.