Holland Basham Architects is a firm of just over 50 architects, planners and designers, founded in 1989 and headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska. Operating from a converted former synagogue, the firm works across 14 sectors and has done work across nearly all 50 US states as well as internationally including India and Germany. With 85% of business from repeat clients, preserving the history of client relationships is central to how the firm operates.
Holland Basham's path to effective email management included two failed attempts, each instructive in different ways.
The first was Outlook Public Folders, used seven or eight years before this story. Filing was entirely manual and required staff to remember to do it. Storage costs on the on-premise server meant protocols to strip attachments before filing. The firm tried assigning responsibility to the first person in the To field. Nobody followed it. Emails either never got filed or were dumped without any organization.
The second attempt was Newforma, a project information management platform. It came bundled with RFI tracking, submittal logs, action items and scheduling. The prompting worked, but the interface was sluggish, discouraging users from filing. The volume of features overwhelmed people. And because Newforma required a VPN connection to the on-premise server, staff traveling or on site never saw the prompt at all. As Warren Curry, Architect, puts it: "As a result of it being so feature-heavy, many of the users were intimidated by it.
Matt Neaderhiser, Director of Innovation, frames their criteria simply: "You go to a restaurant that serves one thing - it's easy to pick what you're gonna get. And nine out of ten times, when they're doing the one thing, they do it better than the place that tries to do everything."
Mail Manager fit: does one thing well, works offline, suggests the correct project nine times out of ten, and is fast enough that filing doesn't interrupt workflow.
When the Newforma server failed, Holland Basham moved rather than reinvest in infrastructure they were planning to retire. Every folder with "email" in the name was dragged into Mail Manager's locations interface. Setup took 15 minutes. Thirty years of emails were searchable on day one.
Deployment via MSI was handled by their IT service - small package, silent install, central configuration that pushes changes firm-wide automatically.
A 3,000-seat performing arts center for the City of Omaha, with around 10 consultants spread across the country in different time zones, demonstrates what the system can do at scale. Email traffic is constant. Coordination is complex. When questions arise about who directed what or why a change happened, the evidence is there and searchable in seconds.
Adoption took around a week to a month. Training was delivered in small groups of 10 to 12, a lesson learned from failed all-company Newforma webinars where people glazed over. The message was kept simple: click the job and file.
Matt's assessment carries particular weight because he is the person who typically hears complaints: "This is the most praise for any software we've ever implemented in our firm."
