Drag and Drop from Everywhere to Anywhere in SharePoint

From the viewpoint of a user of a document management or email management solution, the ability to save documents and emails by dragging and dropping is a really important feature. You can drag and drop to save an email from your Inbox to another Outlook folder and you can drag and drop to save and move files around in Windows Explorer. So if SharePoint is to be truly easy-to-use, it should also support saving and moving via drag and drop.

One of the exciting new features of SharePoint 2013 is its improved support for drag and drop. Microsoft is keen for you to know that Site Mailboxes allow you to drag and drop to save emails and attachments. However on closer inspection this is really saving the emails in Exchange and the attachments in SharePoint, with no prompting for metadata as you save attachments. These and other limitations (see SharePoint 2013 – Better for Document Management?) mean that the Site Mailbox drag and drop is not that attractive after all. SharePoint 2013 also allows you to drag and drop to a library in the web browser UI, but again because there is no prompting for metadata this still falls way short of what users expect – an uploaded document may well not be visible to any other users until the user (or an administrator) edits the properties of the document and completes its metadata.

MacroView DMF provides excellent support for saving and moving emails and documents by drag and drop. One way of describing it is that with MacroView DMF you can drag and drop from everywhere to anywhere.

From Microsoft Outlook

Let’s start with Outlook. With MacroView DMF installed you can drag and drop one or multiple emails from any Outlook folder to save them to any SharePoint document library, folder or document set where you have appropriate permission. Much of the save is performed in the background, so that you can go on working in Outlook while the save proceeds.

As you save, the email attributes (e.g. To, From, Subject etc) are recorded automatically in SharePoint and the resulting MSG files are named so as to prevent other recipients from creating duplicates if they attempt to save the same emails to the same areas in SharePoint. When you double click on a saved email, it re-opens in Outlook exactly as it was when it was saved, including any attachments.

Speaking of attachments, you can drag one or multiple attachments from an open email or from a preview of an email in any Outlook folder, and drop to save them to any SharePoint document library, folder or document set where you have appropriate permission. As it saves the attachment(s) MacroView will prompt for metadata as defined in the destination library – you cannot proceed with the save unless all mandatory metadata attributes are supplied.

From Folders in Windows File Shares

With MacroView DMF you can drag and drop to upload one or multiple files from any Windows folder, again to save them to any SharePoint document library, folder or document set where you have appropriate permission. MacroView DMF will prompt for any metadata that is defined in the destination area of SharePoint, so there is no risk that the uploaded documents will not be visible to other users.

If you drag and drop multiple documents, MacroView DMF lets you capture common metadata, rather than be prompted separately for each document.

From Other Areas in SharePoint

The drag and drop capabilities of MacroView DMF do not stop with saving documents and emails to SharePoint. You can also drag and drop one or multiple documents to move or copy them between areas in SharePoint. The source area can be any SharePoint document library, folder or document set where you have at least Read permission and the destination any SharePoint document library, folder or document set where you have at least Contribute permission. The destination area can even be located in a different Site Collection, Web Application or Office 365 tenancy. This latter capability is very relevant if your Extranets are hosted on a separate instance of SharePoint e.g. running in the DMZ.

As it moves, MacroView DMF reuses existing metadata to satisfy the requirements of the destination library and prompts for any other metadata that is defined in the destination library. If versioning is configured, MacroView DMF will also retain the existing version history and create a new version with a comment that indicates when the move was performed, from where and by what user.