Email Management in SharePoint 2010 #3: Project and Case Management

In my second blog entry, I discussed how SharePoint is bringing together the traditional world of content management and the world of social networking and collaboration. In this third entry, I’ll look more closely at Project and Case Management in terms of the new features and functionality that Microsoft launched in SharePoint 2010 that will help in email management.

The Content Organizer

The Content Organizer is an underpinning piece of the SharePoint 2010 platform. The Content Organizer is a way to automatically classify and route information based on specific properties of that information. This capability makes it easy for users to take large volumes of emails and move them into the SharePoint environment for better project and case management.

Metadata Driven Navigation

SharePoint is all about capturing content along with rich metadata to describe that content. Metadata driven navigation provides a set of Navigators that are bound to specific metadata properties within the organization and allow you to filter information in the document library down to just the information that matches the specific metadata query. User defined filters can also be used to narrow down large volumes of information to a specific set of content that is relevant to what it is that I’m trying to achieve.

Shared Taxonomy

A shared taxonomy is a central metadata repository within the organization that powers the metadata driven navigation. A shared taxonomy is something that everyone can refer and ensures that users are applying consistently terms to content. In SharePoint 2010 this is called the Managed Metadata Service and is essentially a central service that provisions taxonomies. These managed metadata terms can be used to tag emails in SharePoint for better organization and findability.

Document Sets

Document sets provide a way to manage related content as a single entity and are of particular interest to project and case management. Documents sets can contain a variety of document types including emails and enable users to apply, for example, workflow, policy, and specific shared metadata properties to all of the items in that set of documents.

Unique Document IDs

An often requested new feature of SharePoint 2010 is the unique document ID. Every piece of content, whether it’s a traditional document or an email within the SharePoint environment can have a unique document identifier assigned to it. This document identifier lets you find that piece of content at any time through its lifecycle even if it no longer exists in the location that it was originally created or stored. The document ID follows the content through the SharePoint environment and if you search on the document ID, you’ll always find the document regardless of where it is.

For more information on these new project and case management features, please listen to the audio file below and review the slides.

Download the slides here (PDF, Right-Click & Save As)
Download the audio

Tagged as: Colligo Networks, Email Management, Microsoft, Ryan Duguid, SharePoint