How to handle role accounts in an effective way?

Nowadays it is more common to change our jobs many times. This is the reason why personal email adresses become more and more a problem. After an employee leaves the firm questions, how to deal with the remaining account, raises up. For example questions like: “Should the emails be redirected?”, “When should the account be deactivated?”, “Should there be an automatic reply to inform the sender about the drop out?” and “What is the most customer friendly way to make clear that the employee does not work anymore for the firm?” occur.

One solution to fix this problem could be to use so called role accounts (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2142). Role accounts are functional e-mail adresses and not personal. Using these accounts as central mail accounts for the same field of duty brings some benefits. One benefit of these role accounts is that the email adress does not change whether an employee is on holiday, sick or left the company. Another benefit is that the emails are in one and the same account which is accessible for all employees who need to access.

As nice as it sound but one problem remains. The management within the mailbox. With email clients nowadays it is possible to manage different mail accounts, to share mail accounts, to manage shared calendars and to administer a task list. But it seems impossible to make an effective ressource management as well.

I will try to point my thoughts out with the following scenario. We assume the role account is used to conversate with customers and suppliers in the same time. Responsible for this account are 4 people. There is the head of the department, employee A, which manages the ressources and instructs the employees B, C and D which emails they have to carry out. For example employee B has to answer the customer requests, employee C has to type the bookings into the system and has to send an invoice to the customers via email and employee D has to deal with the suppliers. In the normal email account you have the possibility to transform an email to a Job. But then I cannot use the email as such anymore. Here it would be really helpful to mark the Email with the name of the person who should deal with it. Probably to have a team function, where I can create a team and add the members, would be helpful. On the other hand the performing person should have the possiblity to mark the email as done so that the supervisor gets a feedback. Of course other ressource management features can be taken into account.

Checking out the three most common mail systems in the European business world, IBM Lotus Notes (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/uk/lotus/), Novell GroupWise (http://www.novell.com/products/groupwise/) and Microsoft Outlook (http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/), I did not find a feature like described above.

Figure 1: IBM Lotus Notes

 

Figure 2: Novell GroupWise

 

Figure 3: Microsoft Outlook

 

I think the time would be right now to make a change and take an effective ressource managemt within an email client into account. I am sure that role accounts will more and more replace personal email adresses in the future.