Tip of the Week
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Operating Procedure: DOC-00
Unlock Your Mailbox – 4D Style
One of the
great problems facing modern businesses is the black hole of information that
resides in everyone’s email box. Mixed
in with all the spam promising “personal enhancement”, there’s probably one or
two emails in your box that contain relevant project-related information. Unfortunately, as long as they remain trapped
in your email box, this information will benefit virtually no one that is
interested in learning something about the project six months from now.
There is a
solution…an easy one at that.
Send all
emails that contain project-related information to the 4D Server at the projects@cleanair email address. If it is still at the proposal stage, send it
to proposals@cleanair instead. Make sure you put the project number (or
proposal number) in the Subject Line of the email. You can put other information as well in the
subject line, but the project or proposal number must be the first numeric
entry in the line (see examples).
So, if you
are sending an email to someone concerning a project or proposal, either
internally or externally (say, a client), then cc: the message to the
4D server address. If you prefer, you
can bcc: it so that the 4D address is not visible to the human
recipients. Similarly, if a client sends
you an email, then forward it to the appropriate 4D address.
You’re
probably asking, “what if I have an important email but it is not specific to
any one project?” Well, cc: it to clientcontacts@cleanair
instead. In this case, the email will
get attached to the specific 4D contact that the email was addressed to (the
Subject Line is unimportant here). Of
course, this requires that the person be a contact in the 4D database
already…something you should verify (and fix, if necessary) prior to doing
this. So how do you do this if the email
originated from the client? Just forward
it back to the client under the disguise of an acknowledgment (i.e., “Thanks
for the reply…”), and bcc: it to clientcontacts@cleanair.
By doing
this simple step, all project-related emails become part of the corporate
domain and can be accessed by anyone through 4D. Attachments are stripped off of the emails
before they get posted, but we do have the ability to go back later and
retrieve them if necessary.