4 easy steps to ensure compliance using Colligo’s SharePoint connector
If you work in any capacity in an office, including a home office, you are probably reading and sending email daily. Even in the modern office, equipped with some form of instant messaging service like Microsoft Teams chat, email is still the core tool for communicating messages, both internally and externally with vendors, partners, and clients. If you walk around just about any office, the always-open application invariably is Outlook.
The continuing pervasiveness of email requires that you devote attention to preserving and corralling key emails and those with long-term importance (aka records) into a shared repository (most commonly, SharePoint Online). Ideally you want to do this in a way that is simple and does not consume much time in your busy day.
Why you should save email to SharePoint
The reasons for saving email into a shared space, like SharePoint Online or Microsoft Teams, typically fall into three buckets or use cases:
1. Regulatory compliance
Many industries require preservations of communications where you make a commitment to a third party or accept a commitment. The risks of not complying can be devastating to your company’s bottom line. Saving emails from Outlook to SharePoint, a safe and controlled repository, ensures compliance can be audited and appropriate access is granted to the right people.
2. Knowledge management
Projects, especially those involving third parties, create many assets, including documents and emails. Most project managers do a good job of corralling project documents into a single library where they can be referred to for support and future iterations of a project; however, invariably, important emails fall between the cracks and context is lost. Having a complete record of a complex project ensures your organizational knowledge is retained and passed along to those who inherit your systems and decisions.
3. Business automation
Often email is a trigger to complete a task. When you have routine, well-defined tasks that are triggered by an email request, it is helpful to track and delegate processes by copying an email into SharePoint. Then the next steps can be managed efficiently, manually, or even automated with Power Automate or a similar business process automation (BPA) engine.
On the flipside, with most of your documents living in SharePoint and Teams, it can be awkward and time consuming to share those documents with others, internally and externally. With the volume of email only increasing, your modern office needs efficient tools to manage these email challenges. An email connector that can help with both tagging and filing, as well as quickly sending documents is imperative in today’s modern world of work.
How to access SharePoint from Outlook and file email
Colligo Email Manager is a Microsoft 365 add-in that will simplify your retention and sharing needs in a way that end users find natural and IT administrators find reliable and easy to deploy and support.
Getting SharePoint to connect to Outlook is a breeze. In 10 minutes, pulling from the vetted Microsoft solution catalogue, Colligo Email Manager can be securely and reliably deployed to your workforce who can use it anywhere they use Outlook – on the desktop, browser, or mobile app.
Here is how to connect SharePoint to Outlook and allow an end user to file an email:
1. Start Colligo Email Manager
Colligo can be launched from the ribbon and opens as a side panel.
Time Saver Tip! You can conveniently pin Colligo open so that it is always ready to use, making saving from Outlook to SharePoint quick and easy.
2. Select upload icon for selected filing location
For regular repeat fling to a particular SharePoint site, library, or folder you can pin these locations for single-click filing. You can also access any SharePoint, Teams, or OneDrive folder for occasional filing.
Time Saver Tip! You can select and file multiple emails at the same time. Every wondered how to save attachments from Outlook to SharePoint? Attachments can be stored with the email or separately in SharePoint by selecting a checkbox.
3. Note the metadata automatically extracted like the subject, sender, recipient, date/time sent, and more.
If you need to add a retention label or other metadata like a document category, you can do this now.
Time Saver Tip! Colligo can skip the metadata screen if you have no special requirements to classify your emails or attachments.
4. You’re done
Your email is being uploaded now. It is happening in the cloud, not on your machine, so you can move on with your day, or even close Outlook and shut off your computer.
Time Saver Tips!
- Do you want Colligo to remember where you filed this email from a particular sender and remind you next time? Just click on Yes when prompted.
- Wondering how to insert a SharePoint link in Outlook? Colligo also provides a number of single-click follow-on actions that can save you time, such as sending out a link from SharePoint by email, or posting a linked message in Teams, or going directly into the SharePoint library to perform some additional task.
This just touches the surface of Colligo Email Manager functionality (see the full feature sheet). Other use cases include pulling content from SharePoint into your outgoing emails, searching for emails and documents in SharePoint, and much more.
We welcome you to get in touch for a personalized demo of how to save Outlook email to SharePoint or specific features of Colligo Email Manager for Microsoft 365 that will align with your business requirements.
More useful resources on filing email to SharePoint
- Why & How You Should File Email to SharePoint – free webinar
- Why you can’t afford not to save email to SharePoint – blog post
