Interested in using Microsoft SharePoint to store, find and share your Microsoft Outlook messages? Finding that the out-of-the-box integration of Outlook and SharePoint is awkward to use? MacroView DMF and MacroView Message may well be the answer. (
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Out-of-the-box Outlook / SharePoint Integration
There are a number of ways you can save an email message to SharePoint using the native facilities of Outlook and SharePoint. These include:
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Save As from Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010
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Drag and drop to the Explorer View of a SharePoint document library
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Connect to an Outlook discussion and save the message
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Email-enable your SharePoint document libraries
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Exchange Managed Folders
Unfortunately all of these approaches fall short in one way or another. Frustrations include difficulty of visualising and navigating the SharePoint environment, attachments being split off and saved separately, poor naming of the saved message files, messages saved in EML format (which means that they cannot be opened in Outlook) and custom metadata not being prompted for immediately as the message is saved.
Recognizing that better management of email communication is a key issue for many organizations, a number of vendors have developed add-on software that improves the out-of-the-box integration of Outlook and SharePoint. All of these add-ons let you drag-and-drop in Outlook to save an email message to SharePoint, in most cases with automatic capture of email attributes such as To, From, Subject, etc.
MacroView DMF and MacroView Message
MacroView DMF and MacroView Message are popular software add-ons that improve the integration of Outlook and SharePoint so that saving, viewing, finding and retrieving emails in SharePoint is easy and effective. The Outlook /SharePoint integration provided by MacroView DMF is the best-available in the market today, enabling full-function solutions in SharePoint for general document management, as well as excellent email management. MacroView Message is a cost-effective subset of DMF that is attractive to organisations that are looking for a better way of managing their emails in SharePoint.
Email Management Features
The standout email-handling features of MacroView DMF and MacroView Message include:
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Drag and drop to save one or multiple emails or attachments to SharePoint.
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Automatic capture of email metadata – e.g. To, From, Sent date/time, etc
- Prevents duplicate copies of an email message in any one library or folder in SharePoint. which you have permission, displayed in your Outlook environment.
- Excellent handling of attachments for both incoming and outgoing emails, including PDF attachments containing scanned images sent by a Smart Copier or MFD.
- Browse and Preview files stored in SharePoint, including by an intuitive tree-view that automatically displays all areas of the SharePoint document store for which you have access permission.
- Keyword and meta-data based searching for email messages and other files stored in SharePoint, while you work in Outlook.
- Good performance and efficient resource utilisation, even with the largest SharePoint document stores.
- Support for working offline in Outlook and via Outlook Web Access you are still able to drag and drop email and attachments to Outlook Folders that correspond to your Favorite document libraries and folders in SharePoint. You can use Outlook Rules to automatically save copies of incoming and outgoing messages into those folders.
- Support for email-enabled document libraries, so that emails sent to a library have naming, format and metadata handling consistent with emails saved via drag and drop.
- Support for SharePoint 2010 and Outlook 2010.
Download a PDF of the full article here