Introduction
Being able to save Outlook emails to SharePoint by drag and drop is great, but it’s even better if those emails are saved automatically. MacroView DMS, MacroView DMS Pro and solutions based on MacroView DMS Pro (such as MacroView Case and Matter) support automatic filing (saving) of Outlook emails to SharePoint in a number of ways:
These include:
- Outlook rules and Favorite folders
- Personal Filing Rules
- Corporate Email Filing (CEF)
- Predictive Email Filing (PEF)
This article provides an overview of each these solutions and a feature comparison table to help you determine which best fits your organisations requirements.
Outlook rules and Favorite folders
When you add a SharePoint document library, document set or folder as a Favorite, MacroView DMS and DMS Pro automatically creates a new Outlook folder that corresponds to the new favorite location. That new Outlook folder appears in the Mail Folders pane under a <SharePoint> heading folder and can then be referred to using standard Outlook rules to save emails to that location in SharePoint.
See this blog on the MacroView website for more information on using Outlook rule with MacroView favorite folders in Outlook.
Personal Filing Rules
Personal Filing Rules are available out-of-the-box in DMS and DMS Pro and allow each user to define their own personal incoming and outgoing filing rules. These rules can save emails automatically to SharePoint based on attributes of the email such as To or From or a specific word in the subject or body of the email.
See this blog on the MacroView website for more information on using MacroView Personal Email Filing Rules.
MacroView Managed Filing (MF)
MacroView Managed Filing (MF) is an optional module for MacroView DMS and DMS Pro designed to significantly reduce effort needed to file emails when using SharePoint Online or on-premises SharePoint 2013 or later.
MacroView MF rules can be based on attributes of the email (similar to Personal Filing Rules), or can use regular expressions to define powerful rules that recognize filing tags in the email subject and use this information to determine the save location. These advance regular expression rules a suitable for environments with a logical and consistent structure such that components of the filing tag can be substituted into the save path URL allowing a single rule to work for any number of save locations.
The key difference between MF and PEF is that the URL associated with each value for a PEF tag must be recorded in a custom database table making it only suitable for on-premises SharePoint. MacroView MF does not require any custom database table, which enables much simpler installation and ongoing maintenance in an Office 365 / SharePoint Online environment.
See this blog on the MacroView website for more information on using MacroView Managed Filing rules.
MacroView Predictive Email Filing (PEF)
MacroView Predictive Email Filing (PEF) is an optional module for MacroView DMS and DMS Pro designed to significantly reduce effort needed to file emails when using on-premises SharePoint 2013 or later. It is not suitable for use with a Microsoft 365 environment.
MacroView Predictive Email Filing (PEF) recognizes tags in the subject of emails and records the save location associated with each tag in a custom database. The tags are similar in shape and operation to the filing tags that are recognized in the subject of sent and received email by MacroView Managed Filing (MF) but as each tags save location is recorded in a database, they can point to any location making it the perfect solution where the environment structure is inconsistent.
MacroView Predictive Email Filing also provides Suggested Locations based on the sender and recipient addresses.