Thank you for purchasing TMTools.
TMTools is an application developed to simplify several administrative tasks associated with LexisNexis Time Matters practice management system.
The Time Mattersฎ email management system does many things very well, including managing emails in both a matter-centric and contact-centric database, where everyone can view all the emails regarding a particular contact or matter, and far exceeds the leading email programs in this regard. There can be too much of a good thing, however. Saving Time Matters email with attachments can be problematic if the volume is great, and/or the size of the attachments is large.
The widely-accepted best practice is for Time Matters emails with attachments (both incoming and outgoing) to be TMSaved, and then the attachment deleted, to keep the SQL attachment table from growing out of control. A large number of attachments increases the size of the database, much more so than data records, which slows response time and increases the possibility of data corruption due to network or hardware problems.
In the real world, attachments are rarely TMSaved because users see other work as more urgent. Even if users were trained today to TMSave attachments properly in the future so that they could cross-reference the email and the attachment, then delete the attachments, it would take a substantial amount of time to TMSave all of the existing email attachments that most firms have accumulated. This is particularly true of Sent items where users rarely if ever go back and strip off attachments to outgoing emails which are often duplicates of the documents in the document store.
TMTools is an application that runs separately from Time Matters. It was developed by Time Matters CICs Mark Deal and Bob McNeill to automate the time-consuming and expensive process of cleaning up a firm's Time Matters email attachments, and to avoid the ultimately unsuccessful attempts to get users to TMSave their attachments, which leads to unhappy users and less than optimal use of the system.
TMTools is an application that operates on your Time Matters Enterprise database (either SQL or MSDE) version 6 or later. It is not available for Professional.
TMSaves each attachment in every Time Matters email in the email list as a Time Matters document record.
Saves each attachment to a path and filename according to a formula you specify, or simply uses your existing Time Matters document form auto-naming formula.
Creates a specified relationship between the saved attachment (document record) and the email record, so that you can easily cross-reference each saved attachment (document record) to the email to which it was attached, and cross-reference each email to all of the document records that were attached to the email.
Deletes each email attachment after it is saved as a Time Matters document record.
Retains the attachment flag so that you can view the emails with attachments from various email lists.
Empties the attachment table to delete any remaining attachments that may be corrupt, and gives you the option of saving these files to a location where you can review them later.
Can be scoped to process all emails, just certain staff's emails, emails related to just certain contacts or matters, just attachments with certain file extensions, just certain email date ranges, and so on.