A Convenient Way to Store and Share Outlook Emails in SharePoint
As you may have noticed, Colligo Contributor 2.0 supports drag and drop of Outlook emails directly into SharePoint document libraries. This is a pretty cool feature because it means you can now use SharePoint instead of Exchange Server public folders to store project emails.
Here’s a little description of the problem and solution:
As an email sharing and collaboration solution, SharePoint document libraries offer many advantages over Exchange Server public folders, including ease of administration, ease of access, search, and content organization. Yet a number of mission critical requirements must be considered before integrating SharePoint with Microsoft Outlook email, such as:
Microsoft Outlook 2007 is one possible solution since it enables users to drag emails into SharePoint discussion lists. Unfortunately, this approach means that message fields are not saved with the email. They appear just like file attachments. In addition, discussion lists lack the flexibility and organization of document libraries, meaning that you can’t apply metadata and therefore create views based on it.
Colligo Contributor version 2.0 integrates with Microsoft Outlook. Firstly, it enables you to drag emails and attachments into and out of doc libraries from/to Outlook both online and offline. These are then synced with SharePoint through Contributor.
But here’s the cool thing. If you create a document library with columns of a particular name, Contributor automatically maps the email message fields (To, From etc.) to those columns when an email is dragged into the library. Users can apply custom metadata then, too. When online, emails and metadata are automatically synchronized to the server, whereas changes are cached locally when working offline. Users can search, sort, and view emails whether they are online or offline. Setup of email document libraries is simple: templates can be saved as SharePoint content types and then applied across many sites.
By the way, Brent did a terrific set of screencasts on Version 2.0, including the email feature. They are up on our SharePoint support site now.
Barry.
Update: June 25, 2008 – Colligo Contributor 3.0 was released in the spring of 2008 and it now includes an Add-In for Microsoft Outlook that enables users to move content to and from SharePoint within Outlook 2003 or 2007. FYI, I’ve also recently posted a series on email management in SharePoint.
