To Paper or Not to Paper: Going Paperless With HowNow (part 1)

This article is the first of a series of articles on going paperless with HowNow. Click here to read part 2 of this series. To read the rest of the articles, head to the Paperless category.

You’ve been hearing for years that your office needs a paperless document management system. It’s the way of the future. Really, though, your firm is functioning just fine… or so you think.

Are you ignoring the signs? HowNow Document and Email Management developer Margaret George from Business Fitness takes a look at seven indicators that your firm is drowning in its status quo approach and the benefits available from a solution such as HowNow Document and Email Manager.

Symptom: No system for controlling emails

You know what it’s like. Every staff member has their own inbox full of unordered emails, not easily accessed by other team members. The rest of the firm doesn’t know what has already been communicated with a client. Instead of being stored under a client’s file with all their other documents, emails are stored in team members’ inboxes. Important emails are printed and added to a client’s paper file: a waste of time, money and paper.

Solution

With HowNow Manager, these important documents (‘records’) are centrally stored and shared across the organisation. When team members send or delete an email in Outlook they are prompted, ‘Add this email to HowNow?’, storing the email and attachments under the client folder structure on your server, saving them in the original (.msg) format. From an IT perspective, this also keeps .PST files and Exchange Mailbox sizes low. You won’t even need to print emails anymore – they can be filed into the client’s electronic file within seconds. You’ll never go back.