Colligo Blog: Joel Oleson

This is my sixth and last post in a guest series I’m doing here on “The Myths & Truths of Email Management with SharePoint.”. My last post was on SharePoint list scalability.

SharePoint is a great platform for managing email and attachments and has several advantages in the right scenarios. In addition to providing the capability to store, organize, and search for content, SharePoint enables email to become part of the content that is shared throughout the organization. This improves collaboration and content re-use. There are a number of alternatives for moving emails to SharePoint, including out-of-the box methods such as email-enabled lists, managed folders, and third party applications such as Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook. The key to success is building an architecture that is scalable, while making it easy for information workers to use.

This is the fifth in a guest series I’m doing here on “The Myths & Truths of Email Management with SharePoint.”. My last post was on Managed Folders.

Storing all emails and attachments in a single document library is a common practice and popular method for personal storage, however this is not a recommended best practice for knowledge repositories. In SharePoint, document libraries require special information architecture because of performance degradation associated with lists that contain a large number of items.

Happy New Year! This is my first post of 2009 on the Offline SharePoint blog and the fifth in a guest series I’m doing here on “The Myths & Truths of Email Management with SharePoint.”. My last post was on SharePoint email-enabled lists.

The subject of this post is Managed Folders. Managed Folders were introduced in Exchange 2007 to provide administrators with an easy way for users to archive email. Any Managed Folder can be configured such that all emails sent to it are routed to SharePoint. It’s an incredibly insightful feature and when implemented properly can reduce mailbox sizes, while capturing the intended emails and attachments. When not implemented properly, Managed Folders can be abused, causing SharePoint to become a dumping ground.

This is the fourth post in a guest series I’m doing here on Email Management in SharePoint. The third post was Myth #2.

Emailing a post to a blog … very cool or archiving an Exchange Discussion List to a SharePoint list … super cool … but be careful. Email-enabled self service lists can easily get out of control. Microsoft IT, which loves to use nearly every feature of SharePoint, decided against using email-enabled lists.

Email-enabled lists can be a significant IT resource drain. Without the proper planning and management, AD objects will be created with archiving and no lifecycle. Contact account naming standards are another reason. IT doesn’t want to see random contacts in AD.

This is the third post in a guest series I’m doing here on Email Management in SharePoint. The second post was Myth #1.

In early 2006, the Exchange Team at Microsoft outlined their thoughts about the future of Public Folders in a blog post titled “Exchange 12 and Public Folders.” It was intended to let customers know that Microsoft was de-emphasizing Public Folders for certain applications, but many misunderstood this to mean that Public Folders were dead.

This is the second post in a guest series I’m doing here on Email Management in SharePoint. The first post was an introduction.

It’s very common for people to think, “I need access to an important document so I’ll email it to myself and then I’ll have it offline in my PST folder.” While this may provide value to a single user, it conflicts with the goals of enterprises that are trying to make content reusable. When important files are stored on individual user desktops or laptops in personal PST files, the information becomes an island that no one else can access.

As Barry mentioned, I’ve agreed to do a series of posts on Email Management in SharePoint right here on offlinesharepoint.com over the next couple of weeks. I encourage your feedback here or on my blog, sharepointjoel. Feel free to comment or ask questions on the material I’m going to post.

So let’s get started.

With the growing demands for compliance, doing more with less, and information reuse, CIOs, Information Architects, and System Administrators have an overwhelming number of technology choices and strategies to consider when designing a solution to manage and share their information assets. I’m sure we would all agree that emails and attachments form a large part of those assets. Today, users must sort through thousands of emails to find the critical ones while being pressed to make decisions immediately. It’s difficult to find, categorize, and sort content to stay efficient, so data gets lost, and more and more time is spent searching for information.