How do you manage email when staff have multiple roles?

dave-lew99 · 6 Mar 2012 at 20:44

This is more a business question than strictly technical - i work in a small company and many of the staff have multiple roles as well as roles being shared.

At the moment we largely have individual email accounts plus one group mailbox which has around 15 aliases on it.

I'm thinking there must be a better solution - shared mailboxes don't seem to work well as it means extra accounts in the mail client (thunderbird) but using mailing lists doesn't seem like a good idea either as if someone else responds to an email how would you know it has been responded to.

Does anyone have experience of this sort of problem?

lrlcr · 6 Mar 2012 at 20:47

Give the shares roles their own account and use opera mail which merges accounts?

SoundsGood · 6 Mar 2012 at 20:52

Aliases for each department which links to a list of user email addresses in that department. If they need to know when someone has replied tell them to CC in the same alias it was sent to

bigredshark · 12 Mar 2012 at 12:38

Set up an account for each role and delegate access to other users so they can all access the mailbox, with exchange and outlook and appropriate user training this is fairly painless.

It's either that or public folders for group roles so people can see them that way, that doesn't work so well generally with conflicts and such.

bigredshark · 12 Mar 2012 at 12:40

SoundsGood said:
Aliases for each department which links to a list of user email addresses in that department. If they need to know when someone has replied tell them to CC in the same alias it was sent to

This is an option for some roles but for anything customer facing it's a bad idea, you only need to forget to cc the alias and you end up replying twice to the same thing, which when it's a new query and the two people send different answers is bad.

dave-lew99 · 12 Mar 2012 at 14:07

No exchange for us i'm afraid, looks like what we've been doing (shared accounts/mailboxes) is about the best we're going to get.

Opera is looking good as a client, I do like the merged views, however I now need to find a CalDAV plugin for it.

bigredshark · 12 Mar 2012 at 16:15

I'd suggest that you want to consider exchange, in-house or hosted, or at a push google apps which has similar functionality soon. It is rather expensive and perceived as an admin overhead for a small business but it's the standard for a reason, it's *really* good at the whole email/calendaring thing. You should start asking how far you can really go with your current solution.

I'd add, I say that as not the biggest Microsoft fan in the world but Exchange is really a pretty good product, even the similar competitors (openexchange etc) aren't really that close. I've seen exchange deployed in environments which are entire Mac OS and Linux on the desktop side...it's still the best solution then. Not to mention mobile email is delightfully easy.

ThePirateHulk · 19 Mar 2012 at 05:47

I'd strongly consider using Outlook as your email client as it works very well with multipme mailboxes.

I currently monitor 2 shared mailboxes and my own personal mailbox for my job and Outlook makes it very easy to see activity in any of them at a glance.

kerrgreg · 19 Mar 2012 at 09:05

I would defiantly recommend exchange most SBS servers have the functions and licenses installed already, and it is the tool which will solve this problem you have.