Un architecture inc. is a Montreal-based architecture, urban design and interior design firm practicing since 1980. Silvino Marcelino became a partner in 2015 and serves as Senior Associate. When the pandemic arrived in 2020, the firm used the disruption as an opportunity to integrate new tools and develop more efficient working methods, with Ideagen's Mail Manager being one of the most significant changes they made.
Before Ideagen's Mail Manager, every email had to be manually extracted from Outlook to the firm's NAS server, with many staying in inboxes until a project ended because the extraction process was too time-consuming to do regularly. Each project manager was responsible for keeping their own emails stored on the NAS, but it was difficult to enforce and even harder to sustain. At project completion, the administrative assistant had to take over the PST files to ensure everything had been captured. As Silvino puts it: "Our practice requires us to have a complete record of discussions with our clients, engineers, contractors and city representatives. Not having the emails stored with the projects was a main issue for us."
Silvino ran a 15-day trial and worked with Jiten from the Ideagen's Mail Manager team to configure a filing structure mapped to the firm's existing NAS project folders. As Silvino describes it: "Jiten was the best thing that happened to us integrating Mail Manager. He sorted out the process very efficiently." Implementation across 22 PCs was straightforward, with the software pre-configured before rollout, and the initial reaction of "not another software we have to learn" gave way quickly: by the end of training day, more than half the firm was already filing and trying to clear their inboxes, and within two to three weeks the entire team had caught up on a backlog that previously took days and weeks per project.
Since November 2020, un architecture has indexed over 249,000 emails with 200 to 400 being added daily. When a client requested the complete correspondence with a contractor on an archived project, the team pointed Ideagen's Mail Manager at an old folder on an external drive, and within hours everything was indexed and searchable. It took longer to populate the database than it did to find the email.
When filing is fast and the prompt is always there, people file. Within weeks of going live, the whole firm had caught up on a backlog that previously took days and weeks per project.
