Outlook 2007 question

[Saint Borlaug]

I decided to post this here because some of you are military and familiar with gov use of Outlook.

I work in an office of roughly 50 people. Microsoft Office 2007 with Outlook is our primary administrative software.

All our electronic files are kept on a shared drive.

We divide our duties into many different “programs”, and several people can be assigned to the same program. There is a directory on the shared drive devoted to each program.

We also provide services for over 100 clients. There is a directory on the shared drive devoted to each client.

I’m trying to figure out a solution to this problem: Email is sent to personal email boxes (in Outlook). How can this email be easily filed so that coworkers working with the same program or client can see all relevant email traffic?

Currently we have three solutions:
1. Create an Outlook Data File that is located in a client/program directory that can be accessed by everyone (non-password).
- This has the disadvantage that several people cannot access/populate the data file AT THE SAME TIME (outlook crashes).
2. Create a folder in the client/program directory where we drag and drop.
- This has the disadvantage of not being sorted by sender/receiver/subject/date etc. unless you manually load the files into Outlook (messy).
3. Create a shared email box for each program and eliminate (or at least delist) personal email boxes.
- This costs overhead to changing our current practice and probably has other disadvantages I haven't foreseen yet.

Is there a better alternative to these three schemes? I'm leaning towards the third solution.

[Blues]

do you have an exchange server?

[Carl]

If you have Exchange, you'll have to set up distribution lists and stuff. It's pretty easy. Just create the lists, add people to them, and tell your clients to use those email addresses instead of emailing direct to employees. If you don't have Exchange (it's expensive), you can set up a decent Postfix mail server that can do what you want. Postfix is free and extremely flexible (maybe even moreso than Exchange...I've done some pretty wild things with Postfix), but there's no pretty GUI for configuring it like Exchange (unless you install Webmin and use the Postfix module for web-based configuration). If you're here on Okinawa, I know of a company you can outsource your email to and they do a pretty good job. PM me if you want more info.

Edit: I'd have to strongly advise against using shared PST files. That's just asking for problems. The best way is to have the mail server handle it.