One Click Access to the Documents and Emails for a Project

You are storing the documents for your projects in SharePoint – for each project there is a corresponding document library, folder or document set. You want to be able to click on a hyperlink and jump straight into that library, folder or document set so that you can access the documents and emails that have been stored for that project. Not a problem is you are OK to work with those documents and emails in the native SharePoint web browser UI. But what if you prefer to work with documents and emails using MacroView DMF, which provides a much richer set of options for document and email management?

By ‘richer set of options’ I mean the ability to see where the document library / document set / folder is located in the overall SharePoint tree, to preview documents and to have a right-click menu that provides options to Rename, Move, Copy, View Audit Log entries, Compare, Print etc – in addition to the options that you get in the OOB SharePoint web browser UI. Richer also means being able to drag and drop one or multiple emails or documents to save them to the Project.

The good news is that MacroView DMF lets you create a hyperlink to a library, folder or document set so that when you click the link you find yourself in MacroView DMF Explorer, already navigated to the Project area. You can also create a hyperlink to a document so that when you click the link the document is opened from SharePoint and already checked out, ready for editing. In other words, with just one click you are ready to work with the documents and emails for a project.

These ‘smart links’ are implemented by the MacroView DMF Protocol Handler. Sounds technical, but it is really simple – just a regular hyperlink prefixed with dmf:

For example if the URL for the document library that corresponds to a Project is :
http://servername/sites/clientname/project101

then the smart link is simply:
dmf: http://servername/sites/clientname/project101

You can record the smart link in the record for the project in your Project management system or CRM system. You open the record, click the smart link and next thing you are in MacroView DMF looking at the documents for that project. If Outlook is running (e.g. on a separate display monitor) then you can save emails to the Project simply by selecting them in Outlook and dragging and dropping them to MacroView DMF Explorer.

BTW, if MacroView DMF is already opened it will get focus – multiple copies of MacroView DMF do not get opened by the protocol handler.