Brainlitter » Did you know you can post emails directly into a Document Library?

Did you know you can post emails directly into a Document Library?

Here’s another one that comes up now and then…

 

Did you know you could save emails directly into a Document library (such as in our business case, our Clients Documentation library)? While it may not be necessary all the time, if something was said (technical details) or stated (warnings to the client), it may be good on occasion to store them in SharePoint, where the information can be quickly retrieved and/or searched later. This way, information that would normally be lost in someone’s personal email filing system or Sent items, can actually be shared with the whole team.

 

Yes, of course, you could email enable a Document Library but the challenges with that (besides the setup) is that you will have multiple email addresses to manage (one per library) and you won’t be able to target suitable subfolders, which may be desirable for such sorting).  Also, it is important to point out that another approach would be to consider Colligo Contributor (3rd party application).

 

Here’s one way to do it…

 

  1. Create a ‘correspondence’ (or other name) subfolder in your Clients documentation folder (so it doesn’t fill their main folder up with goo…)

 

 

Now that you have that folder created, you are ready to ‘save’ Outlook messages of importance, to that folder and here’s how…

 

  1. Find that important message in Outlook and choose the Office Button (in Outlook 2007+) or the File Menu (in Outlook 2003) and choose Save As

 

 

  1. At this point, you can Save/Publish this Email (just as you can in Word, Excel, etc.) directly to your SharePoint Library if you know its complete path OR simply type *over* the Email File Name (don’t worry, once you are in the library to save to, when you click save, that file name will be preserved).

 

 

  1. In my example, I’m only putting in the base URL of my portal and then I’ll ‘browse’ to the library I want to save it in…

 

 

 

 

Voila, my email shows up in the proper folder, in the client’s document library, complete with the proper message icon. I can click open and review it and when my Search Index runs tonight, it will be available for discovery if I (or someone else) needs to find it in the future.