243 - TZL - Reg Prentice

folders beginning with the project number, I would say most firms do that. Like 95% do that already. You rarely find a company where there's no project number in the file path. 0:18:55 - (Reg Prentice): The rigorousness of that still varies. When I'm advising companies, I like to see it very rigorous because there are contracts involved as well that need to be matched to the information that's saved. Then I think where starts to break down for firms is one, is email. Because email by default is organized by person, not by project. So people get emails and people have mailboxes, and it's very hard to cross over mailboxes. 0:19:32 - (Reg Prentice): I haven't seen any firms where everyone has access to everyone else's mailbox. Generally, you only have access to your own. 0:19:41 - (Randy Wilburn): But are you supposing or saying that like, if everybody has this kind of central repository of putting data in a place, then everybody has access to it? Not necessarily to your specific email, but maybe to the information that was referenced in that email? 0:19:58 - (Reg Prentice): No, I would say in Tonic by default, everyone has access to everyone else's email. So it is a copying system. So emails are copied from staff mailboxes into the central Tonic repository, and you don't have to trigger that, right? So you could choose to have emails stay in your mailbox and not be copied to the company Tonic project store. And there are also some features for confidentiality and locking projects so that not everyone can get in there. So there are some basic roles around that, but for the average email, it will be in Tonic and everyone will have access to it. 0:20:41 - (Reg Prentice): And the key for that is that often questions come maybe a couple of years later, and the people on the project may have even left the firm. And so the person tasked with answering that question, like they either have to go to individual staff mailboxes from the past and try to find the information just from a mailbox, which is practically impossible, or they can in just one minute, they can go to Tonic, type in the project name or number, and there is all the email in a filterable and searchable way. 0:21:15 - (Reg Prentice): So some firms see the value mostly in the archive, to go back later. But it's also very valuable while the project's going on because not everyone is on every email, particularly a project manager may come onto a project partway through, and they kind of need to know what's being discussed already. And if it's structural engineering, they can just filter by that firm and see all the emails on that project relating to structural. So there is value both while the project is going on, but also for the archive for later as well. 0:21:50 - (Randy Wilburn): That sounds exciting because I think what it does is one of the problems that it solves is, and I talk about this all the time, is just the proper transfer of knowledge, not just between generations within a design firm, but between colleagues. You're down the way in a cubicle, and I'm here in a cubicle and it's like how do we get the information or get access to information that I need, that you've had, or that you've processed? And so I think it's important to figure out how you make that as seamless as possible, because that transfer of knowledge, that transfer of information is vital to a design firm. It's vital to any

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