For the past week I’ve been kayaking up Clayoquot Sound - a positively blissful experience. The trip was organized and guided by my dear friend Kim Crosby from Wildheart Adventures, who always put on a terrific trip. But (sigh) now that I’m back to reality I noticed a few interesting blog posts that I wanted to share.

Andy Dale MCSE, who works for Officetalk in the UK, wrote a couple of interesting posts. The first one entitled “Six Summer SharePoint Sizzlers” highlighted a number of SharePoint Add-on products that he found interesting. His comments about Colligo Contributor were very flattering, indeed:

“Award winners at Tech Ed 2008. Colligo is a real SharePoint gem because it provides easy offline synchronisation allowing laptop users to always have access to their most important SharePoint libraries.”

In a later post, he did a more in-depth review of Contributor. I love the title: SharePoint “Open All Hours” and this quote:

“SharePoint is now at the heart of many businesses and the addition of Colligo makes it an even more powerful tool and a saviour for the customer facing staff who travel the globe visiting existing and potential customers.”

The next post, “Recording - Exchange Public Folders vs SharePoint - the battle (Community Day 2008)”, is by Joris Poelmans (AKA JOPX), Application Group Manager at Dolmen (www.dolmen.be), a leading Belgian IT services company and Microsoft Gold Partner.

The post is based on a session at “Community Day 2008”. On Community Day, 9 User Groups, Belgian Dynamics Community, Biwug, IT-Talks, Pro-Exchange, SCUG, SQLUG, Visug, Winsec, and XNAbug combined their efforts and organized a joint-event.

The post features an interesting recording of a “battle” that pits SharePoint against Exchange Public Folders. This is very topical for me given the recent series of posts I did here on Email Management in SharePoint. In the recording, Ilse Van Criekinge, Exchange MVP (and Community Day keynote speaker) and Joris Poelmans (SharePoint MVP) stage a “punch up” to see if the new kid on the block, SharePoint, can give a black eye to the old master, Exchange Public Folders. I think SharePoint fares rather well and only comes out with a few minor scrapes. A special thanks to Joris for demoing Colligo Contributor Client about 30 minutes into the recording. I think that Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook can help SharePoint bulk up even more against EPFs because it enables users to drag and drop emails into SharePoint document libraries from right within the Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 interface. Now that’s a battle I’d love to see: SharePoint+Contributor Add-in vs. Exchange Public Folders - Las Vegas here we come!

This is the fourth post in a series based on a Colligo whitepaper called “Developing an Effective Email Management Solution in SharePoint”. If you’d like to read the full whitepaper or view the associated webinar with special guest speaker, Kathy Hughes, Microsoft MVP, you can get them here.

In the third post we outlined some of the tradeoffs that need to be made when developing an email management solution in SharePoint, then explored the capabilities of the out-of-the-box solutions. In this post we will take a closer look at our product – Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook. This is not meant to be an advertorial, but to provide a bit more detail on why we incorporated certain features into the product.

Colligo Contributor Add-In integrates many SharePoint elements into the Outlook interface, including document libraries, lists, metadata, views, and content types. It also includes special support for Outlook emails (discussed later). It’s a small .NET application that’s installed either by the user or, in an enterprise deployment, by IT using a silent install. There are a number of configuration options available that can be applied on the .msi during installation or updated using a login script. The Contributor Add-In does not require server installations or configuration other than conventional SharePoint (MOSS or WSS).

With Contributor Add-In, files and emails can be dragged and dropped into SharePoint document libraries that are accessible through the Outlook folder tree. Emails can also be moved or copied into SharePoint automatically using Outlook rules. Depending on the sync configuration and whether users are connected to the network, files and emails are immediately uploaded to the server or cached for automatic synchronization the next time users are online.

SharePoint libraries and lists are added to Outlook using the “Connect to Outlook” button that is automatically installed on the Internet Explorer toolbar. This enables users to create a SharePoint folder in Outlook in a self-serve fashion with no IT administration required. It reduces the hassle for both users and IT compared to Exchange 2007 Managed Folders with auto-copy as discussed in a previous post. Optionally, IT administrators can push out a configuration file to the client that automatically links a set of document libraries and folders to Outlook without user intervention. This file can also be used to manage a number of configuration options, including default metadata for individual folders (see discussion of version 3.1 launching in the last week of June 2008).

Colligo Contributor Add-In can synchronize many SharePoint elements, and has capabilities to handle emails and attachments. When an email is dragged from the inbox or other Outlook folder into an email library, an event handler on the client extracts the message fields and automatically populates the corresponding metadata fields before the file is stored in the document library. Users can also set the content type and add custom metadata at that time, or later (from within Outlook), for further classification. The email, attachments, and metadata are immediately uploaded to SharePoint as a .msg file with an automatically generated unique name.

Attachments can also be dragged and dropped into document libraries. Users can be optionally prompted to add custom metadata to classify attachments. Files stored in SharePoint document libraries that are cached in Outlook can be dragged onto emails as attachments. This highlights one of the advantages of Colligo Contributor, namely that users can set content type and metadata at the time they move content to SharePoint. The metadata editor shown below pops up when users drag-and-drop emails or attachments into document libraries through Contributor folders. With the Contributor Add-In, users do not need to go to the browser afterwards to set required metadata or change the content type – they always stay in the Outlook interface.

Metadata support is further enhanced in Contributor Version 3.1 (scheduled for release at the end of June 2008). Folder-level metadata support fills in a gap in SharePoint by enabling users, or IT through the configuration file mentioned earlier, to set default metadata properties at the folder- or list-level. Metadata prompting can then be turned off so users need only drop content into a folder to automatically upload and set default metadata. Also in version 3.1 is Office 2007 metadata support which enables users to set metadata through the “Document Properties” pane in Office 2007 as an alternative to the Contributor “New Item” dialog.

A standard SharePoint document library that has been setup with a metadata (columns) that represent email message fields (i.e. To, From, Subject, etc.) is all that’s required on the SharePoint side. An optional .xml file on the client can be used to configure the mapping of email properties to metadata fields. Email libraries with these characteristics can be setup by site administrators, designers, or end users through the use of content types that are available in SharePoint 2007. Content types can also provide a way to setup document retention policies, which can be used to determine when emails are to be deleted or routed for archival. There’s a good article on the Colligo Support site that describes how to setup document libraries and map metadata.

The Colligo Contributor Add-In can provide users access to SharePoint content and views whether they are on or off the network because it has the option to cache SharePoint offline. Local caching improves user productivity with instant access to content when working offline (e.g. when travelling) or over slow connections. Of course, for users who only work online, or for large email libraries, caching is neither required nor practical so the Add-In provides the option to cache on a library-by-library basis. Note that drag-and-drop and automatic metadata extraction for this library work in the same way as in the cached version. For office workers who will never require offline caching, Contributor Add-In is available in an online-only configurations.

For a closer look at the Colligo Contributor Add-In, you may want to view the Contributor (Outlook AddIn) Quick Overview screencast on the Colligo support site. The next (and final) post on email management in SharePoint will conclude with a summary of the capabilities of the out-of-box solutions and compare them with Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook.

Windows IT Pro and SQL Server magazines announced last Friday that Colligo Contributor Pro won Best of Tech-Ed 2008 in the Productivity and Collaboration category. We had the pleasure of attending the awards ceremony on Thursday evening at the “Terminator 2″ in Universal Studios and were pleasantly surprised when they announced we’d won. Gotta say I’m really proud of the team at Colligo who created the product and then generated the market awareness that got it noticed. And thanks to the many customers who gave us the opportunity to prove that Contributor delivers tangible benefits.

We’ve posted a link to the webinar (”Best Practices for Using SharePoint for Email Management”) that was held on May 29. I mentioned it a few posts back. It’s available here. For those that weren’t able to attend, this is a great way to catch up on the content you missed. It also includes the whitepaper (”Developing an Effective Email Management Solution in SharePoint”) that my series of posts on email management in MOSS was based upon.

Kathy Hughes, MOSS MVP, does a terrific job. She was such a pleasure to work with. A special thanks to her for creating and delivering such great content!

By the way, there were over 1,700 registrants for the live webinar. We had about 150 questions to answer by email afterwards. Wheh! And we’ve had hundreds of people download it in the last couple of days. Obviously a very active topic of interest to a lot of people.

During the webinar registration process, we conducted a little survey. The results were interesting and I’ll post them here.

Joel Oleson made an interesting post on the benefits to becoming a SharePoint MVP. Looks like they have a lot of fun! We are really fortunate to have worked with a few MVPs, such as Bob Mixon, Dustin Miller, Corné van Dyk and now, Kathy Hughes. Thanks to all of you for your support of Colligo!

By the way, Corné van Dyk just announced he is joining Dustin Miller at SharePoint Experts… Best of luck Corné!

Wearing your Colligo “share” shirt … is that what it takes? I think there’s a bit more to it than that :), but we were really pleased to see that Joel posted a photo (reproduced below) of some MVPs wearing their shirts. It was tagged “The Motley Crew of SharePoint MVPs in Orlando at the Shuttle Launch”. Must have been from Tech-Ed last year.
.
Show us your shirt! We’ll put your picture up on this blog wearing your Colligo “share.” shirt. Just send me a message through the contact form and I’ll do the rest.

If you don’t have a shirt, you’ll get your chance at the Tech-Ed North America 2008 event, June 10-13 in Orlando.

Now for a little shameless self promotion… But, hey, we can’t help being proud of our baby!

According to the news release, Colligo Contributor Pro Version 3.0 desktop software for SharePoint was named as a finalist of the “Best of Tech•Ed 2008 IT Professional Awards” in the Productivity and Collaboration category by Penton Media’s Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine.

The list of all the finalists was posted on EdTech Show Daily today. The other finalists in our category are: Easy CRM SharePoint by BPA Solutions and Resource Central by Add-On Products. Very cool products! Congrats to both companies.

We’re are really proud to have been named a finalist. Let’s keep our fingers crossed… Winners will be announced at a private party within the Microsoft Attendee Party on Thursday, June 12 at 8:00 pm at Tech-Ed in Orlando.

This is the third post in a series based on a Colligo whitepaper called “Developing an Effective Email Collaboration Solution in SharePoint”. In the second post we looked at key issues that should be considered when implementing such a solution. In this post we’ll look a bit closer at best practices, summarize the currently available out-of-the-box solutions and conclude with a checklist you can use to evaluate these solutions (and others you may be considering).

It will come as no surprise that the requirements for email collaboration vary widely depending on the scenario that needs to be supported. A common scenario is project management, since emails and attachments often form the critical part of project documentation. Storage in SharePoint ensures that the content is structured so that it can be retained and located easily through search. This also makes it easy for new team members to get up to speed when they join a project mid-stream (rather than having to locate and forward multiple email threads to them). Another common scenario is departmental communications (e.g. all emails from product management) where emails are used to track issues or topics. Yet another is personal email management where emails and attachments are moved out of Exchange to SharePoint MySites for longer term storage, to avoid inbox size limitations and/or to avoid the use of .PST files.

While requirements vary, in practice designers only have a limited number of solutions to choose from for interfacing SharePoint with Outlook. The limitations of each solution vary considerably and can have profound consequences on the key success factors I discussed in the last post. Therefore, it’s important to understand, up front, what the options are. The following list summarizes some of the variables that designers will encounter between different solutions for email management in SharePoint. Where practical, I’ve outlined recommended best practices that will help to achieve an optimal result.

1. .msg Email File Type - storing emails directly in .msg format keeps the emails and attachments together (if desired) and enables users to easily open them later in Outlook. Some solutions that move emails to SharePoint from Outlook will strip email attachments off and store the email body in .eml format (which cannot be opened by MS Outlook).
2. User Provisioned Library Setup - one of the great advantages of SharePoint is that users can easily setup and configure document libraries and lists on their own, then move content to them without requiring IT support. Solutions that require IT to setup the association between Outlook folders and SharePoint libraries will not gain widespread acceptance by end users and will create a lot of work for IT.
3. Drag-and-Drop Within Outlook - the user interface is key to rapid acceptance of any email management solution. MS Outlook users have come to expect they can just drag content into Outlook folders to move it to Exchange or PSTs. Solutions that follow this method for moving content to SharePoint will reduce training time and increase adoption.
4. Automatic Metadata Extraction - email metadata (i.e. To:, From: etc.) are critical for the success of any solution since they enable emails to be classified for organization with SharePoint views and search. Emails have over 20 distinct properties, so it is not practical for users to enter these manually. A successful email solution should automatically capture all required email properties and store them in SharePoint. This solution should be configurable so email properties can be properly mapped to SharePoint metadata.
5. Support for Custom Properties - requirements often extend beyond the capture of standard email properties to custom metadata properties (such as project #, document type, or workflow). A versatile email management solution should enable users to set custom properties at the time they move emails and attachments into SharePoint. This eliminates the need for them to set custom metadata in SharePoint later - a deterrant to adoption.
6. Support for Content Types - SharePoint 2007 Content Types are very powerful for centrally administering document retention policies and defining required metadata. Users should be able to choose (from a list) the Content Type they wish to apply to an email and attachment. The solution should update available metadata fields depending on the content type chosen so that users do not need to set required metadata later in SharePoint
7. Offline Access to SharePoint Content - a certain percentage of users will require offline access to email content stored in SharePoint so they can access it when they are traveling (on the plane, at a client site etc.). This need is often high in project teams. Choose a solution that provides users the capability to selectively cache content they have moved into SharePoint.

There are a number of out-of-the-box solutions that come standard with a combination of SharePoint and Microsoft Office. These are very neatly summarized by Kathy Hughes in her recent presentation on the different MOSS email upload alternatives. These solutions are as follows:

1. Drag-and-drop to SharePoint Explorer View
2. “Connect to Outlook” Discussions
3. Send Emails to SharePoint Document Libraries and Lists
4. Exchange 2007 Managed Folders

Each of the out-of-the-box methods has it’s own unique set of capabilities. The following table compares the capabilities of each of the methods to the requirements and recommended best practices outlined earlier. As a sneak preview, we’ve added a column on the Colligo Contributor Outlook Add-In, which will be the subject of Part 4, the next post on this subject:

This webinar may be of interest if you’ve been following our recent posts on email management in MOSS. Office and SharePoint Pro and Windows IT Pro are hosting the event on May 29th: "Best Practices for Using SharePoint for Email Management."

Attend this practical "How To" webinar to learn the pros and cons of the most popular options for integrating Microsoft Office Outlook and SharePoint Server 2007 – to better support email management in your organization. Discover strategies for a successful deployment that maximizes user adoption while minimizing the burden on IT.

WHEN:            Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 11:00 AM EDT

SPEAKERS:    Kathy Hughes, Microsoft MOSS MVP
                          Barry Jinks, President & CEO, Colligo Networks Inc.

Webinar Highlights

• Advantages of MOSS for email management
• Key success factors & planning considerations
• Options for saving emails & attachments in SharePoint
• Drag-and-drop to Explorer View
• Native support in Outlook 2007
• Send emails to Libraries & Lists
• Exchange Managed Folder "Auto Copy"
• Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook
• Recommended best practices

Join Microsoft MVP Kathy Hughes as she shares tips and tricks to help your organization leverage SharePoint to:

• Drive user adoption of your email management solution
• Enhance collaboration on projects and company-wide
• Increase email retention by turning users into fans
• Improve productivity online & offline
• Reduce reliance on Exchange for content management

If you are responsible for SharePoint or Exchange in your organization, you won’t want to miss this webinar! Join us to learn best practices for using SharePoint for email management – You can register here.

This is the second installment in a series of posts based on a recently released Colligo whitepaper called “Developing an Effective Email Collaboration Solution in SharePoint”. The first post discussed the use of Exchange Public Folders (or Managed Folders in Exchange 2007) to upload emails. This post will dive more deeply into some of the key issues that need to be considered when implementing a successful email management solution.

Email management is a specific use case within the broader category of Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Microsoft published an interesting whitepaper that lays out the “Keys to Successful ECM”. In summary, they are:

• Maximize User Acceptance
• Minimize the Burden on IT
• Meet Diverse Organizational Needs

Ease of use and user adoption are generally top of mind when developing an email management solution. The above mentioned Microsoft whitepaper reinforces this point:

“Perhaps the most critical factor in ECM success is how well a system is embraced by its users. Even if every other ECM goal is met, any system that fails in this regard will have limited success. On the flip side, users will extol a system that they perceive as streamlining their workday, improving their productivity, and making their jobs easier.”

In an email management solution, requirements often include the ability to move emails and attachments into a managed server environment through the Outlook interface. SharePoint enables users to email attachments to a document library, however the attachments are stripped off and stored separately while the body of the email is stored as a .eml file that cannot be opened by Outlook. Best practise, then, is generally a drag and drop interface that enables users to move content to Outlook folders manually or automatically using Outlook rules, then upload the email and attachment together to a SharePoint document library as a single .msg file.

Outlook 2003 does not support direct upload of emails and attachments to SharePoint and Outlook 2007 doesn’t upload documents directly to SharePoint document libraries. It does, however, provide the ability to upload email messages to a SharePoint 2007 Discussions list. In this case, the majority of email metadata (e.g. To, From, Cc, Received, etc.) is lost in this process (e.g. Outlook changes the “From” to the person who created the item to the Discussion list, not the original sender of the email). Many organizations require full metadata extraction even for just collaboration purposes. Storing email in a discussions list is usually not considered an option for email retention purposes.

So Microsoft generally recommends using managed folders (in Exchange 2007) with auto-copy to SharePoint. Managed folders appear in a users mailbox, making them a convenient and easy-to-use location to drag and drop emails from their inbox or other folder. An Exchange administrator can then configure a managed folder to auto-copy items added to it directly into a corresponding SharePoint library. However, this approach has two problems. Firstly, the creation and linking of the managed folder in Outlook to the corresponding SharePoint library can only be done by an Exchange administrator. This could represent a significant workload for IT with thousands of team sites and takes away from the goal of SharePoint as a user-administered platform. That conflicts with the second key to success, namely reducing the burden on IT. From the Microsoft whitepaper:

“If the ECM solution requires extensive IT involvement, professional developers, or consultants to set up new sites and workflow processes, many business needs will be left unresolved even though the organization has invested in the technology to meet these needs.”

The flexibility of SharePoint enables organizations to implement different classification schemes, thus meeting a “diverse set of organizational needs”, the third key to success. In the case of SharePoint 2007, this requires setting metadata and content type. In fact, knowledge management best practices dictate that documents (including email) be classified by users at the time they are uploaded to the server.

This requirement highlights a challenge with all of the previously discussed options for moving email-based content into SharePoint. Outlook 2007 discussion list integration, Exchange 2007 “auto-copy” from managed folders, and libraries configured to allow incoming email; all share the same problem that users cannot configure content types or metadata at the time of moving the item into SharePoint. This means users must separately access the SharePoint library later through the browser to set the required properties – this can be an annoyance for users, and also a problem for IT trying enforce adherence to corporate document management standards.

FYI, Kathy Hughes, a sharePoint server MVP in Australia, has put together a terrific set of presentations and recordings on the topic of storing email in SharePoint, called “Emailing MOSS”. Her presentation on the different upload alternatives is particularly interesting and quite detailed.

In my next post I’ll look into some methods for helping to achieve the keys to success with email management.

We’ve just drafted a whitepaper called “Developing an Effective Email Collaboration Solution in SharePoint”. It discusses some of the user adoption issues that must be faced when tackling an email collaboration implementation project and discusses how Colligo Contributor can help to solve them.

Many thanks to Brent Bolleman for his contribution to the document. Also thanks to Michael Sampson for his comments and suggestions on the early draft.

Please feel free to add your comments. Let me know what you think!

EPFs or SharePoint?

Email management is a critical requirement for many organizations today, however deploying and supporting an effective email management solution can pose significant challenges for IT. In addition to heavy storage requirements, email management systems must support categorization of emails, preservation of critical metadata and accurate, timely search of message content. Use cases will vary between organizations; however requirements are often driven by two broad scenarios: 1) Collaboration, i.e. members of a team or department that need to share emails as part of a project, and 2) Retention, i.e. the need to store and search emails and attachments for regulatory or legal reasons or to prune email archives to reduce storage requirements.

Email retention solutions for Microsoft Outlook users often involve Exchange Public Folders (EPF’s); or what are now called Managed Folders in Exchange 2007. For consistency, I will use “EPF” to refer to both Exchange Public Folders and Managed Folders. Microsoft has recommended best practises for using EPF’s as part of an email retention solution. There are also a number of specialized third party solutions that enable organizations to archive, delete and search emails and attachments based on their retention policies and legal requirements.

This series of posts will focus on the email collaboration scenario. While EPF’s were traditionally used for collaboration (or document and email sharing) applications, they have been “de-emphasized” as the primary email sharing tool, though they are by no means dead. In any event SharePoint is becoming the recommended solution for many email and document collaboration scenarios.

SharePoint has several advantages for email collaboration applications. Firstly, it has lower administrative overhead associated with creation, permissions, maintenance and deletion of shared folders. Secondly, through the use of SharePoint content types, administrators can easily set global retention policies on email so that it can be automatically deleted or routed to a SharePoint Records Center or other email archive for storage. In addition, SharePoint’s powerful search capabilities make it much easier to locate relevant emails and attachments.

In the next post I will cover different solutions for moving emails and documents from Microsoft Outlook to SharePoint.