Forum Discussion
Document library for incoming correspondence
I am thinking to add document library to the existing TeamSite where all the incoming correspondence will be saved. All incoming correspondence will be first scanned and saved into that Document Library. It is important that the library is searchable so that later people can search for documents in that library. Is that possible to do with the standard Document Library? Or should I look for other solutions?
- spucelik
Microsoft
A couple approaches:
- If you are on premises you can E-mail enable a library and thus save documents to this library. Beware that if you are going to move to O365, E-mail enabled libraries are not supported.
- Content organizer feature is another option that is based on metadata and rules around moving the content to the right library for storage.
- There are a few 3rd party solutions that have tight integration with SharePoint and entire scanning process. They fully support metadata to enhance the search experience.
- If you are diligent in capturing metadata on the documents, the content search web part and display templates can be used on the documents.
All the solutions above are based on standard document libraries.
- Since you are in SPO, you don't have this out of the box and you can either use the Content Organizer as advised by Chris or built something more custom using different pieces such as Flow, Azure Functions, etc
- So these are paper being scanned and uploaded into SP?
If so I would recommend enabling content organizer to ensure unique filenames.
Then you need to see if it makes sense to use metadata to help search / filter to find documents instead of just the built in search which is supposed to do ocr type scanned text to index but I’m not sure how it’ll work on a mass scale. I still think metadata works wonders if you have a specific set of data you can categorize everything I to.thanks a lot for your reply. One question regarding the built-in search, does the built-in search feature searches by metadata?
- spucelik
Yes the SharePoint search functionality and display templates (how you want the search results to look) are heavily vested in Metadata and corresponding managed properties in the Search Schema. This is a very powerful but not well understood area. It's worth investing time in researching it as it will totally change how you design and use SharePoint.
