What tool do you use to track important correspondence?

Post date: 2020-02-21 06:45:44

At your organization, are you required to track certain incoming letters and emails, often from Very Important People, and your organization's responses to them? What magical tool (a wish list inside) do you use?

Do you work in an organization where you are contacted by policymakers, stakeholders, citizens, or others, who are writing to you for advice, assistance, or to complain? What kinds of tools to you use to track this correspondence? I'm mostly looking at hosted software solutions.

Ideally it would be something where we could:
* have different log ins/credentials based on roles
* save incoming emails and the attached PDFs of letters
* track what part of the organization the correspondence is being assigned to
* allow for due dates/deadlines and tell us where we're approaching them
* provide a platform where multiple people can view/edit/approve the response
* give us the opportunity to categorize the writers into different groups (VVIP, VIP, NVIP, etc)
* provide a search capability to search past communication on similar topics (maybe requiring input of metadata from us, which would be OK)
* be a repository of our all incoming letters tied to our responses to those letters.

I'm *particularly* interested if work in or are connected to a local, state, or federal government organization.

We do not have the ability to install new software, or to modify our current software to make this happen. We do have a budget for this, within reason (ha ha). Part of me thinks I could come in on a long weekend and throw up a nice Access database to do this, but it's been 15 years since I've mucked around with database design. Has the market solved this problem?

Thank you all very much!

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