This is Part 2 in the series Managing Documents with SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 - MacroView DMF Adds Value in 10 Ways. For the full text of this article, click here.

The most frequent type of enquiry we receive is from organisations that have been trying to use SharePoint as a means of managing their email messages. They find that even when they are using Outlook 2010 and SharePoint 2010 that the experience is far from user-friendly. These frustrations are much the same as with Office 2007 / SharePoint 2007:

·         By default, email messages are saved in .EML format, which means that when clicked they do not re-open in Outlook.

·         Attachments are split off and saved separately.

·         Saved messages are named based on their Subject and duplicate copies of an email message are not prevented.

MacroView DMF™ adds a new pane to your Outlook window that makes it much easier to manage emails and their attachments in SharePoint than with standard Microsoft Outlook – even Outlook 2010.

MacroView DMF adds a new pane to Outlook 2010, which lets you view and save emails in Microsoft SharePoint 2010. When you click on a Document Library, Folder or Document Set in the DMF tree-view, you see your preferred View of the files stored in that area. DMF preserves Discussion Threads when you sort by Subject.

When you click on a file stored in SharePoint – e.g. an email message – you see a formatted preview of that file, without needing to open it from SharePoint. DMF also provides a convenient an intuitive interface that lets you search (with SharePoint Search or FAST Search) for emails and documents stored in SharePoint, directly from Microsoft Outlook.

You can drag-and-drop to save one or multiple email messages to ANY of these areas in SharePoint. As it saves, DMF will automatically record email attributes (To, CC, BCC, From, Subject, Sent, Received, etc) and name the resulting MSG file so as to prevent duplicate copies of a message in any one area within SharePoint. The user is prompted for any additional metadata columns defined in the destination library. The save itself is performed in the background, so that you can continue working while the save completes. Saved email messages will open back into Outlook - with their attachments preserved. You can filter to find a particular stored file and then open it or insert it as an attachment or link in a new email message.

For the full text of this article, click here.