Caruso St John Architects

Since its foundation in London in 1990, Caruso St John has been pursuing an architecture that is rooted in place. Caruso St John’s approach brings an intensity to the built work and ensures the rigorous construction quality for which Caruso St John is renowned. The result is an architecture that is considered, meaningful and enduring.

The practice is consciously international in its outlook, and in 2010 a second office was opened in Zurich. Christian Sager, Business Administrator, is based in the Zurich office. Christian is responsible for a wide range of administrative and back-office activities, including HR, and uses Mail Manager on a day-to-day basis.

Christian says: ‘When I started at Caruso St John around seven years ago we had already implemented Mail Manager. Our London branch had already implemented the Outlook add-in so it was a simple decision to make as they were already using it and happy with how it was working. In Zurich, our set up is an open plan office and all of our staff, around forty-five people, are architects using Mail Manager’.

When asked about the importance of the management of emails, Christian outlined that ‘it would be very unprofessional to not have an email filing system. For example, when people leave, their emails are gone otherwise. So having an archive with everything stored locally is key. These days so much is in email -not only communication but also files and attachments - so it has to be managed properly’.

‘Even if you don’t need to find emails 90% of the time, the 10% makes it worth it. You are really in trouble when you cannot find something important. You just never know’.

Caruso St John is using Mail Manager in both their London and Zurich offices, making project information visible across the business. Christian says: ‘We have a public location of Mail Manager with all projects and office information, and then more private parts on a different server which is password protected for HR and confidential information. Not everybody has the same level of access to everything. It’s on permission levels for usernames’.

‘There are two main tasks that Mail Manager helps with. Firstly, we have exchange accounts for our staff and our mailboxes aren’t huge per employee. Mail Manager helps to get rid of the data and store it locally, reducing our storage costs. Secondly, Mail Manager provides access across the team to all emails, which is very important to us. We now have all emails and attachments in a centralised place’. When asked about additional benefits, Christian also describes the search functionality as ‘really easy to use’. ‘When a project is done and for some reason, for example, legal reasons, we have to print out all emails from a specific time period, it’s really easy to do that. Without Mail Manager, this would be a very labour intensive activity.’

‘I’ve had to do this before on a project where we had to print all emails from a specific employee from a specific period of time. With Mail Manager I could use the filtering options to make that process really quick and easy’. Summarising, Christian describes his experience with the company as ‘overall, very good! Support is always fast and I’m happy to see the regular new software updates and versions’.

‘Simply put, we can’t live without an archiving system in place. Mail Manager is critical to that. It does exactly what we need’.