Email management nowadays is a critical requirement for organizations today, that is a known fact. Deploying and supporting an effective email management solution poses significant challenges for IT.
In addition to heavy storage requirements, email management systems must support categorization of emails, preservation of critical metadata, and accurate, timely search of message content.
Most organisations needs can be distilled into 3 categories:
- Collaboration: members of a team or department that need to share emails as part of a project
- Retention: the need to store and search emails and attachments for business continuity, regulatory, or legal reasons
- Archiving: reduce storage requirements or to prune email archives
Mails are stored in your email solution, in most cases Outlook. Your emails used to be stored in EPF's (nowadays managed folders). So why do you want to stock them in SharePoint?
SharePoint has several advantages for managing emails and attachments:
- lower administrative overhead associated with the creation, permissions, maintenance and deletion of shared folders.
- through the use of SharePoint content types, administrators can easily set global retention policies on email so that it can be automatically deleted or routed to a SharePoint Records Center or other email archive for storage.
- SharePoint’s powerful search capabilities coupled with rich support for metadata make it a great platform for organizing and locating emails and attachments.
So now you have your Outlook and your SharePoint, which are 2 different platforms (unless you are using Lotus Notes ofcourse ;) ). So how can you make them talk with each other? Well, there are a lot of ways:
1) drag and drop them from Outlook to a document library with explorer view
2) attach an email address to the document library and forward your mails (which results in ugly .eml files :( )
3) use a 3d party solution like Colligo
Colligo brings in some great extra's, like offline caching, adding metadata (like email about project 1234) and support for content types
6 comments:
About 3rd party tools - Colligo cost 125$ per-seat. SharedLook allows uploading of e-mail & metadata from Outlook to SharePoint for 20$ or less per seat.
hmmm, I will surely take a look at that!!
We tried both and ShareLook has significantly less functionality than Colligo Contributor (hence the cheaper price tag).
Here's just a few differences we found: 1) It's not a drag and drop interface and requires a lot more clicks to use; 2) It's only one way sync (from Outlook to SharePoint); 3) It doesn't support offline access so attachments or emails can't be accessed when you are out of the office (so it can't be used as a substitute for PST files); 4) It only extracts a few email properties (5 to be exact), while Colligo extracts over 20; 5) There are a lot of differences in how the products handle metadata (hidden fields, required fields etc.); 6) It doesn't support check out; 7) filenames are rudimentary and not configuarable; 8) It only supports document libraries (not custom lists like Colligo); 9) II configuration options are non-existent ... etc. etc.
We are sticking with Colligo Contributor.
I also prefer Colligo. They good support and follow up (even locally).
Hi,
You should try and have a look at Email-Manager for SharePoint.
It automatically catches emails from the Exchange server and if the email is company related (via a look up in contact db) the email will be stored in a SQL db and made available via a readymade webpart which they actually give you the source code for. It solved my problems and I found it at www.email-manager.com
My company uses a 3rd party tool called myDocs, which can upload email from Outlook to SharePoint together with metadata. I feel it is easy and convenient to use.
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