Founded in 2017, DYSE Structural Engineers are a young structural engineering practice, based in Manchester. They are passionate about delivering great engineering to private and commercial clients, developers and contractors throughout the UK. Their small team works across all aspects of structural engineering including buildings, bridges, civils, temporary works, assessments and surveys, bringing differing approaches and ideas to their projects with the goal of achieving engineering excellence.
Moving from Public Folders and manual filing to Mail Manager
Engineer and Founding Director at DYSE, Ed Dablin, launched his structural engineering firm in September 2017, and first started looking into email filing in March 2018 with his business partner. Ultimately, their quick business growth and opportunities took precedence, and email management fell to the back burner as it often does for many companies. Their firm quickly grew and gained recognition, despite the impact COVID-19 had on the industry.
DYSE was fortunate to have founded their business completely in the cloud. They ran all of their systems through Microsoft 365, SharePoint and Public Folders prior to implementing Mail Manager in March 2021. Prior to Mail Manager, DYSE ran all of their files on SharePoint, which was then synced locally to each employee's machine, which worked quite well for them. One of the main drivers Ed indicated for implementing Mail Manager was planning for the future and making their business more scalable.
Ed commented: "We're only a team of 10, so we don't have an IT department or HR department, that part of the business is managed by me. But the key thing is we wanted permissions, and everything to be scalable so that if we do have IT or HR people in the future, they'd be able to have an area they could access. And I think this is quite important for email filing. Not every email should be accessible by everyone."
Ed continued: "Before Mail Manager we were using Public Folders which had use, but a lot of limitations. Only a few of us were using this, but due to it's limitations we never did a full rollout."
Since the company engages in over 100 projects a year, their manual way of storing project information and filing emails was getting quite complicated. Ed added: "We needed something that could adapt to loads of different filing locations."
What DYSE were looking for in an email management solution
Ed and the team had previously looked at a number of email management solutions, but they hadn't found one that suited all of their needs. They wanted something that was suitable for project-oriented filing, had permissions, no duplicates, could file emails to SharePoint, and was quick and easy to use. One of their new starters recommended Mail Manager to Ed, as he had used it in his previous role. Ed commented: "I liked the idea of being able to file my emails and use my inbox as a bit of a to-do list, and Mail Manager enables people to do that if they want. It's also very project-orientated when filing, and we could have permissions that are fully integrated with the Microsoft 365 groups. It just works fairly seamlessly."
"For the Public Folders, if the Directors all received the same email, we'd end up with three copies in there which wasn't ideal at all. Mail Manager thankfully just handles that. And we wanted to be able to file directly to SharePoint. We were really pleased with how quickly that actually works through Mail Manager. When you file an email, you can actually keep that in your inbox so you can still search your mailbox, and I like the idea of being able to retain that. Plus, it's all fully reversible if we ever wanted to go back to Public Folders, for example."
"Speed was very important to us. I probably get 100 emails a day so finding emails quickly was very important. Mail Manager has a very clever algorithm to do that. They also have a very clever indexing system which means searching for emails is very fast. And it's regularly updated, which is always good to see!"
DYSE's Mail Manager implementation process
DYSE began their journey with Mail Manager with a 15-day free trial. Ed commented: "The implementation was fairly straightforward. Because we use SharePoint, we set up a dedicated site for emails, and we set up folders for various locations. Every folder we wanted to file in, we set up in SharePoint, which wasn't too difficult because we could copy our existing file locations and just empty out the contents. And then we just had to set up within Mail Manager to point to those locations to file within SharePoint."
"We were able to move our emails into Mail Manager very easily, it's got a very good processing engine. Everything was quite easy, the main thing is just making sure you take the time to structure it in the way you want to, if you don't have an existing structure."
Once the trial was completed and they were happy their needs were met, DYSE rolled Mail Manager out within their office, and then out to the wider team. The Mail Manager team helped DYSE train their employees in how to use the software, so the team were up and running quite quickly.
When asked if he had any advice to give around the implementation process, Ed said: "Our advice to our people is to file everything. I like the idea of trying to get to inbox zero - if you file everything, what's in your emails is left unactioned... We didn't have any resistance to change, we've got quite a young team so everyone was quite excited to get this on board."
To hear more about DYSE’s experience implementing Mail Manager, you can access our on-demand webinar here. Or to see Mail Manager in action, book a demo with our team today.
