If you're sick of company emails being sent out with missing attachments, typos and wrong addresses, then you might be interested in Microsoft 365. On Microsoft 365, you can manage message approval, so that certain emails sent from your company are screened and approved first.
Office 365 to Microsoft 365: A quick note about Microsoft rebranding
Microsoft recently rebranded some of their Office 365 commercial plans, which are now called Microsoft 365. This won’t affect the price or the content of these products, it’s simply a name change to illustrate that new apps and services have been added such as Microsoft Teams, Streams, Forms and Planner. You can find out more about these changes in their blog post here. As such, in this article we’ll be using the new name, Microsoft 365.
What is Microsoft 365?
Microsoft 365 is a cloud-based service, which allows you to access the entire Microsoft Office Suite from anywhere with almost any device. For a monthly subscription fee, you can work remotely on all of your files at the same time as a colleague on the other side of the world, share or update files on the go, and have everything available instantly.
Microsoft 365 also comes with a bunch of awesome features so you can take complete control of your business. One of these is message approval, which is the feature that we're looking at today.
How does message approval work?
Message approval is exactly what it says on the tin. When an email is sent from your company, using Microsoft 365 you can set up either a mail flow rule, or a distribution group. Using these processes, Microsoft 365 can send your email to a moderator for approval, before it reaches its final recipient.
A moderated distribution group is useful if you need all messages to a certain group to be approved by someone in your business. This could be a certain client you're working with, or a company handling finance or legal matters - literally anything at all. A mail flow rule is useful if you're looking to flag emails that meet certain criteria specific text patterns, individual senders or certain recipients can be included in a mail flow rule. You can even set up exceptions.
Once you've set up your distribution group or mail flow rule (or asked a great IT support team to handle it for you), the way that emails are sent changes. All the emails that don't hit the criteria you've outlined are sent as normal, but for emails where the rules apply, the mail flow rule or distribution group kicks in.
If you're using Outlook as your email application, when the rules apply to an email, the composer of the email is notified before the email is sent. When they click send, the email follows the chain you've set up. It can then be approved or rejected by a moderator, where it's then sent onto the final recipient or back to the sender for editing. If a moderator ignores an email that needs to be approved, it is sent back to the sender two days later.
How can message approval benefit my business?
Message approval can be hugely beneficial to businesses. If you're sending emails of a sensitive nature, or emails that contain personal data, you might use message approval to regularly monitor the way that these emails are written and sent. It might be that you use message approval to check for typos before sending messages to important clients, or it might just be that for some subjects you'd prefer to have a little more control over what is sent by whom.
What if I need an awesome group of IT support engineers to help set this up?
If you think message approval is something that could benefit your business, we can help. Our IT support engineers are well versed in Microsoft 365, and can talk your company through making the move. If you already have Microsoft 365, our team can set up mail flow rules and distribution groups to meet your requirements, so that you have total control over your emails.
Give us a call on 0191 482 0444 to find out more about message approval
