METADOCS: Astris Teamware Suite provides solutions to email management challenges for shipping companies

Summary

• Shipping companies exchange thousands of e-mails daily.
• Standard e-mail software does not suffice when handling large volumes, causing problems with the flow of work in the company.
• Astris Teamware Suite provides effective and efficient solutions to counter the above.

The Challenge

Shipping companies exchange thousands of messages daily with vessels and third parties which, for medium-sized ones, can be around 3.000 whereas larger companies may exceed 5.000 to 6.000 messages in a day.

This can be particularly challenging for several reasons. First of all, the majority of e-mails need to be available to the majority of users. This means that hundreds of messages are received by users just to be available “in case they are needed”. Frequently, they end up remaining unread in users’ mailboxes for months or until they are archived or deleted. Secondly, standard systems and software are not enough when handling these many e-mails. Microsoft Outlook when deluged with such volumes cannot perform reliably or even accommodate them. That being the case, IT staff tends to improvise creating more problems than they solve in the process.

The Solution

Astris Teamware Suite divides mail traffic to Personal, Departmental, and Other. In this manner, the standard Inbox will only contain e-mail addressed to themselves, a separate folder “My department” will contain every e-mail received for or sent by the users’ department. A third folder “Other departments” will contain e-mails that are addressed to other departments the user is interested in monitoring. This last folder being excessively large is usually the cause of poor Outlook performance. For this reason, a special Astris functionality takes over this folder and displays all of the thousands of e-mails that would reside there, but without the actual messages being in the user’s mailbox.

This new Astris feature has been adopted by Diana Shipping Inc to assist with their message management, and it has already been proved to be useful and effective offloading user computers and their Exchange Server from millions of messages.

Benefits

• Ensuring all users have access to every email they might need just in time without actually having received it.
• Avoiding problems caused by poor Outlook performance.
• Saving user and IT staff time spent on dealing with overflowed mailboxes.