Date
02/02/2016

Author
Anita Fritz

Best-in-Class Bulk Saving of Email to SharePoint

Sure, users want to be able to drag and drop emails to save them to SharePoint, but they don’t always want to save just one email at a time. Frequently users want to drag and drop hundreds of emails to SharePoint in a single step, with accurate metadata capture and minimal time and effort. If you want to save emails to SharePoint ‘in bulk’, MacroView DMF and MacroView Message (the subset of MacroView DMF that runs in Outlook) are the best available SharePoint add-ons. All the comments in the following paragraphs about MacroView DMF also apply to MacroView Message.

By now pretty much everyone knows that with the out-of-the-box integration between Outlook and SharePoint you cannot really drag and drop to save emails to SharePoint. The Site Mail Box feature of SharePoint 2013 / Outlook 2013 initially looked like it would overcome this limitation, but on closer inspection the Site Mail Box feature is more like ‘drag and drop to save email attachments in SharePoint without metadata while the email bodies are still stored in Exchange’. The default SharePoint ability to save Outlook emails is crippled by its inability to capture metadata.

There are a number of SharePoint add-ons that enable you to drag and drop to save emails in SharePoint. MacroView DMF is one such SharePoint add-on. Most (if not all) the SharePoint add-ons for email management let you drag and drop to save an email or an attachment; as the email is saved its email attributes (i.e. To, From, Subject) are captured automatically and the result is a MSG file that can successfully be opened again in Outlook. Most of the add-ons automatically name the MSG so as to prevent duplicate copies of an email from being created when multiple recipients attempt to save it to the same area in SharePoint.

In my view MacroView DMF is already the leading add-on for saving emails and their attachments to SharePoint, especially if you have a large SharePoint environment. In addition to all the ‘standard’ capabilities mentioned above, MacroView DMF provides an accurate display of all the areas of the SharePoint tree for which you have access permission:

  • SharePoint Web Applications
  • Site Collections
  • Sites, sub-sites
  • Document Libraries
  • Document Sets
  • Folders and sub Folders

MacroView DMF also lets you efficiently navigate around these areas and lets you drag and drop to save to any library, document set or folder that appears in your SharePoint environment – i.e. to anywhere you have permission to save.

Bulk Saving of Emails to SharePoint

The user scenario occurs frequently – at the end of the day or the week, or a project you need to clean up your InBox (and maybe also your Sent Items). This involves saving dozens or even hundreds of emails to document libraries, folders or document sets in SharePoint. These bulk-email-filing exercises are tedious and you really want them to proceed with a minimum of time and effort.

MacroView DMF provides excellent support for drag and drop saving of multiple emails to SharePoint (i.e. bulk saving) in a single step:

  • If there is one or more metadata column that DMF cannot capture automatically, the DMF profiling dialog will display within seconds of the drop. Once you complete this dialog and click OK, the upload progress dialog appears almost instantly.
  • If MacroView DMF is able to capture all metadata automatically (which is the case with a good design), within seconds of the drop the upload progress dialog will appear.
  • You can click the Close button to dismiss this dialog and then continue working in Outlook – the upload of emails will proceed in the background.
  • If you wish, you can drag and drop further batches of emails to commence saving them to SharePoint, even while earlier bulk saves are still being handled in the background.
  • Meanwhile, back in your InBox (or other Outlook folder that you are dragging from) you will see that the emails that have been saved to SharePoint either have their yellow category indicator set, or alternatively are deleted (depending on your Delete Emails on Successful Save setting).
  • The memory utilisation of MacroView DMF is tuned so that you can select many hundreds of emails in a single drag and drop save.

Got to go now – I’m actually looking forward to saving a few thousand emails to SharePoint!

Check out this YouTube video of MacroView bulk email filing in operation.

Contact MacroView for more information about how MacroView DMF and MacroView Message enable best-of-breed email management solutions on the SharePoint platform.