Navigate the Email Rapids with inMailX

by Legal Practice Intelligence - February 2012

Do you think you receive a lot of emails? Have you noticed that if you complain to someone that you receive x number of emails per day that they'll likely tell you that they receive more.

Have you also noticed that no matter how many emails you receive each day, excuses for not finding, reading or responding to them have become increasingly unacceptable.

These attitudes must have arisen because we're all in the same boat.

The flood of emails has become a fact of working life, particularly for legal professionals. Fortunately for us, technology company Digitus has come to the rescue, throwing us a life line, if you like.

 

The designers of email programs such as Outlook put their initial focus on making sure that emails arrived to users as fast and as accurately as possible. What users did with those emails was the users' concern. By contrast Digitus' primary concern has been about email management, compliance and productivity. Hence it developed a suite of Outlook extension tools which together are known as inMailX.

The tools can do far more than is possible to explain in a short article. You will need a demonstration of inMailX to gain an understanding of what the tools can do for you. Legal Practice Intelligence sat down at Digitus' headquarters in North Sydney for such a demonstration.

We thought we knew a thing or two about Outlook add-ins and tools but what we saw far exceeded our expectations. inMailX turns Outlook into Email 2.0 or 3.0.

The origins of Digitus as a company and the strategic decisions that it took make for an unlikely and inspiring story of how inMailX came into being.

In the early to mid 90s Digitus was an importer of IT hardware components such as CD Roms and fast internet switches. It also imported parts for the assembly of its own-branded personal computers.

Florin Boiangiu, who became the managing director of Digitus Information Systems Pty Limited as it exists today, joined the company in 1994. Florin is of Romanian origin and was a technology student at Politehnica University of Bucharest.

He set about transforming Digitus into a services company with the aim of becoming a systems or network integrator.

Florin made two significant bets on the future of technology: Novell and faxing. Digitus developed deep expertise in network faxing technology and also gained certification as a Novell Engineer.

Had it not been for these two big losing bets the company might not have moved on to its next incarnation as a developer of software. The expertise it built up in systems integration was by no means wasted. inMailX is only useful because it integrates with other systems.

It was the faxing technology that brought Digitus into contact with law firms. The faxing clients became clients for whom Digitus provided systems integration services. This was mainly for Novell platforms and included GroupWise, which is Novell's collaboration and email system. Expertise was also developed with Lotus Notes.

The fortuitous breakthrough came in 2004 when an important law firm client decided to move from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook. This was part of the firm’s migration from Novell and associated systems to the Microsoft product suite.

As its IT consultant and systems integrator, Digitus assisted the client through the transition. However, the law firm believed that it was taking a step backwards in moving from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook.

The firm's IT director asked Florin if he could add some of the functionality into Outlook that existed in Lotus Notes. This functionality was important to the firm's workflow and productivity.

This was a turning point for Florin and Digitus.

How often do technology companies knock back client requests because the technology company believes it has other priorities?

This time a technology company said 'yes' and it was probably the most important 'yes' in Florin's career and Digitus' future. Florin told Legal Practice Intelligence that he was up for the challenge. He was excited about the project and had good developers working with him.

Since 2004, other clients have moved from Lotus Notes to Outlook and inMailX has been implemented by them. The early clients effectively took the role of Beta users. Now, many years later, law firms that use Outlook can acquire a much-tested, advanced generation set of inMailX tools.

For most legal professionals, email is experienced as a raging torrent with intermittent rapids. This time it looks like Digitus made the right technology bet. The need for such tools has never been greater.

Learn more about inMailX at this link

© 2012 Legal Practice Intelligence

© 2012 Legal Practice Intelligence