Email Suggestions Guide

Introduction

Filing emails can often be a monotonous daily task, and we understand this. That’s why we’ve introduced Email Suggestions. Email Suggestions help you to index emails by learning how you have previously filed emails. 

If anyone in the business has filed an email against the client, then everyone benefits. Virtual Cabinet learns this association between the email address and the index information you fill in.

Email Suggestions must be configured before they can be used, but this is a 5minute job by anyone with access to the Admin tab in Virtual Cabinet. It doesn’t require any IT knowledge, no changes are required in Microsoft Exchange, and can be used in conjunction with any of the existing Email Capture facilities.

Using Suggestions

You’ll see Email Suggestions in the Outlook Indexing Pane, just like this:

In this example, Virtual Cabinet has been set up to suggest client information for the clients filing cabinet, but it can be set up to suggest anything, e.g. policy data, matters, case numbers. See the section below on how this is configured.

Select one of these suggestions when you want to index the email, and it will helpfully fill in the client details for you. You can then review and fill in any other information before indexing the email.

For outgoing correspondence the suggestions are based on the first email address you are sending to, and for incoming correspondence the suggestions are based on the email address you received it from.

Enabling the Indexing Pane

Email Suggestions will require you to have the Virtual Cabinet email Indexing Pane enabled. This panel appears on the right hand side of emails you open and provides a quick way to index emails. Even if you don’t use Email Suggestions it’s a great feature.

To enable this feature open up Outlook, go to the ADD-INS tab, and click on Options. In the Virtual Cabinet Outlook Options window navigate to General, and then tick “Show indexing pane”.

Configuring Email Suggestions

Configuring Email Suggestions for your company is a five minute job that requires no server configuration, all you need is access to the Admin tab in Virtual Cabinet. There are two areas that you’ll need to change…

Which Filing Cabinets should we suggest?

You decide which Filing Cabinets are displayed and the indexes that you want to suggest. 

To do this go in to the Admin tab of your Virtual Cabinet system and click on Configure Email Suggestions.

From here you can select from the list of Filing Cabinets on the left hand side; you probably want to start with your Clients Filing Cabinet. On the righthand side you can select and add the indexes that you want to show suggestions for. You probably want to use your Client or Client Code indexes to start with. 

Click Save and Close and that’s all done.

Which users should see Suggestions?

Not all users may want to use Email Suggestions, or you may want to introduce this feature in smaller groups or stages. Therefore, we allow you to enable Email Suggestions per user. 

In the Admin tab of Virtual Cabinet go to View Users and then double click the user you want to give Email Suggestions to. There is a tick box for “Show Email Suggestions” that you need to tick. 

Once this setting is ticked the user will start seeing Email Suggestions in the Outlook indexing pane the next time they launch Outlook. It’s as simple as that!

Indexing Defaults

Email Indexing Defaults may not be necessary for Email Suggestions, however they will compliment them nicely and will help you streamline your email filing process.

The majority of your emails will be filed with similar characteristics, for example:

• Filing Cabinet = “Clients”
• Document Type = “Correspondence”
• Description = the subject of the email
• Document Date = the sent date of the email

Email Indexing Defaults allow you to set these defaults so that you do not need to fill them in every time you file an email.

They are very easy to configure, simply open up any email and go to the Indexing screen. Click on the cog wheel in the bottom left (see below) to bring up the “Setup Indexing Defaults” window. In here you can select the default Filing Cabinet, section, and index values. 

If you want to use information about the email (e.g. email subject) to populate indexes (e.g. Description) then click on the three dots next to the index, find the value you want to use and double click on it. In the example below we are using Email Subject as the description and email sent date as the Document Date.

Tip! Any user can set up these Indexing Defaults themselves, but an administrator can also set up default values that all users can use. As an administrator, go in to the Admin tab of Virtual Cabinet and click on “View Indexing Defaults”. From here you can set the default values, and also administer any individual user’s settings.