I often get asked how best to integrate emails in Outlook with SharePoint. Here is my answer.
Three options, and which is best really depends on what your requirements are – from simple sharing of emails, to organisation wide records management, or somewhere in between!
- Use Exchange 2007/2010 managed folders in conjunction with email enabled SharePoint document libraries. Allows emails to be dragged and dropped to a folder in Outlook, and for those emails to be copied to SharePoint, using the journaling feature of Exchange. Best done as part of the implementation of an organisation wide records management system. See George Khalil’s article for an example of setting up Exchange and SharePoint to do this.
- Use one of a number of third party tools to enable drag-and-drop between SharePoint and Outlook, from within Outlook. Examples are Colligo Contributor and KnowledgeLake Connect.
- If you want a fairly low tech way to get emails into SharePoint by dragging and dropping from within Outlook, use a discussion board. Simply ensure incoming email is enabled on your farm, create a discussion board in SharePoint, then from within SharePoint click on Actions/Connect to Outlook. You can now drag and drop emails to the discussion board from within Outlook, and they will be copied across to SharePoint.
If you have any other ideas or suggestions please leave a comment!
only i can say that you have provided very good information. Thanks
I do not have any new idea or comment but I would really like to appreciate the information provided by you.
The information is concise and to the point.
Thank you.
Huzefa Mala.
With incoming email enable in a discussion board list, is it possible to configure an OUTLOOK-generated email in some way that will direct it to a *particular existing topic* in the discussion board list? By using the topic ID number for example, somehow in the email?
Great ! Just what I was looking for. Can’t wait to test the last option.
Interesting article about connecting e-mails and SharePoint sites.
Eric,
I think that, if the email has the same subject line, it’ll be grouped with the discussions of the same subject. That’s what happens in the drag-and-drop method in any case. Worth a go.
Sean
ok, now comes the question: what do you do when the link between outlook at sharepoint is broken? I’m trying to fix this problem at the moment because we got a new computer. How do I restore that link?
Kelly,
I am not sure which method you are trying to use to connect Outlook with SharePoint. There are a few options available:
– Manually save an email message to SharePoint (Save to desktop and upload)
– Email enable a SharePoint list
– Map a drive to a SharePoint library (Drag/Drop to mapped drive)
– Use a discussion forum
– Connecting Exchange and SharePoint
– 3rd Party solutions such as OnePlaceMail (Note: I am associated with OnePlaceMail) – The free Express Edition may meet your requirement:
http://www.scinaptic.com/download-express-edition.html
Regards,
James
Nice article.
I’ve recently written a blog post on a similar topic – “Five out-of-the-box ways to get email into SharePoint”. Your readers may like to check it out as well. http://camerondwyer.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/five-out-of-the-box-ways-to-get-email-into-sharepoint