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!
