Chain Mail
Chain Mail is iQmultimedia's custom email workflow solution. Leave hard-copy workflows behind and let Chain Mail take care of the hard work for you!
Chain Mail operates within Outlook® 2003 or greater as a fully-integrated Outlook toolbar. Users can initiate a workflow (defining a message, including any attachments, a respondent chain and flags), action a workflow message they've received, or view all workflows currently in the system. Chain Mail handles backups, workflow management, audit-logging and can even integrate with your existing document control systems.
Software Development
Chain Mail was originally developed by request of South Eastern Sydney Illawarra Health Service, who found themselves snowed under with their hard-copy document workflow.
With many documents needing quick approval by many geographically distributed staff members, we worked closely with SESIAHS to produce a system that best integrates with their requirements and technological requirements.
We developed Chain Mail using Microsoft's .NET Framework, allowing us to seamlessly integrate into Microsoft® Outlook® using VSTO. What all that means to the client is that iQmultimedia was able to develop Chain Mail quickly and efficiently, allowing for more development cycles for your dollar. It also means Chain Mail is less volatile to future updates to Windows or Outlook.
How it works
In order to seamlessly handle backups and email marshalling, Chain Mail operates in two parts; a server and client. Chain Mail Server can run on any machine on your network and connects to both the database and Microsoft Exchange. Each user has Chain Mail client installed as an add-in in their Outlook, and never needs to communicate with the database or any other members of the queue; instead, it funnels all requests through to Chain Mail Server (which allows us to log any workflow requests incredibly thoroughly).
Our web-based authentication system uses single sign-on to ensure that only those with physical access to an administrator's workstation can modify important settings.
Of course, since we build it all in-house, we're able to adapt Chain Mail to work any way you require. If you're interested in discussing how Chain Mail can help you, please get in contact with us.
