Webcor Builders Improves Email Management With Colligo Email Manager

Webcor Builders is one of California’s largest commercial builders. Using Microsoft SharePoint and Colligo Email Manager, Webcor project teams have improved collaboration and organization, saving time and money.

Colligo Contributor Uploader made it easy for staff to move important project related emails and attachments from Outlook to SharePoint, and helped to improve the adoption and ease-of-use of SharePoint for email records management.

About Webcor Builders

For more than 35 years, Webcor Builders has served clients such as Oracle, eBay, Lucasfilm, and the California Academy of Sciences, building large-scale, high-profile, sustainable projects. Known for its award-winning leadership in sustainable “green” building and multi-dimensional Virtual Building technology, Webcor Builders is recognized as one of the most innovative general contractors and construction managers in the United States.

Application

Webcor Builders chose Colligo Email Manager to improve collaboration and organize emails and files. Project managers, engineers, and other staff can drag-and-drop project-related emails and attachments from Microsoft Outlook to SharePoint, automatically capturing email metadata for easy retrieval.

Business Challenge

Webcor Builders initially chose SharePoint as their email records management system. “Prior to SharePoint, our teams used Outlook mailboxes and Exchange Public Folders to manage project-related emails,” said Richard Grove, Senior Project Manager at Webcor Builders. “During the course of a project, team members would liberally send cc’s to everyone involved in the project, as well as to the team’s Public Folder alias. When the project was completed, team members would move all project-specific emails to the same Public Folder but would also keep a personal copy on their computer ‘just in case’.”

This system soon overloaded the teams with emails. Project members received thousands of emails, and hundreds went unread.

“People were reluctant to look in the project’s Public Folder, given the fact that it contained everything from invitations to birthday parties to automated messages generated by our large file repository. The fact that a single query of a Public Folder might take 15 to 20 minutes, during which time the computer was unusable, made finding a specific email very problematic.

“Finding an easy and effective way to integrate Outlook and SharePoint was critical to driving user adoption and the success of the project, as well as Webcor’s growth as a forward-thinking company,” said Grove.

Solution: Colligo Email Manager

Webcor Builders added Colligo Email Manager to their SharePoint deployment to address these challenges. “After an exhaustive search for third-party applications, we identified Colligo Email Manager as the only solution that provided us with both the seamless integration between Outlook and SharePoint, along with the ease-of-use that we required,” said Grove.

For each new project, a SharePoint site is set up. Preconfigured email folders that address different aspects of the project are provided, and the project team may add subfolders depending upon the specificity that they require. Once the site is set up in SharePoint, Colligo Email Manager is used to display these SharePoint folders in the project members’ Outlook folder tree. “Working in the familiar Outlook environment made the team members happy and really helped them to embrace the solution,” said Grove.

Using Colligo Email Manager, project staff can easily drag-and-drop emails and attachments from their inbox directly into the project’s SharePoint email folders. Twenty-two email properties, such as To, From, Subject, and Received, are automatically extracted and captured as metadata when the emails are moved to SharePoint. Using the email metadata properties, the view that is created for the SharePoint folder essentially replicates the way the email appears in Outlook. Since emails are stored as .msg files in SharePoint, when selected, the email opens in Outlook and can be replied to or forwarded, just like any other email.

“Colligo Email Manager has made it easier for our project teams to work with SharePoint and helped drive adoption of SharePoint for email records management at Webcor,” said Grove. “By automatically capturing all the email properties as metadata, the ability to find specific emails during and after project completion has been greatly enhanced.

“Our experience with Colligo Email Manager and SharePoint has been terrific. In fact, we’re currently looking at expanding the use of SharePoint and Colligo Email Manager beyond email management to include document management as well. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Colligo Email Manager has been central to the success of our SharePoint project,” concluded Grove.

Results

By deploying Colligo Email Manager, Webcor Builders has been able to:

• Ensure adoption of SharePoint as an email records archive and management system
• Enable project teams to easily drag-and-drop emails and attachments to SharePoint
• Ensure that email metadata is captured at the time emails are uploaded
• Improve email retrieval during ediscovery initiatives
• Reduce email broadcasts by providing a framework for communication and collaboration