I hope that by posting this it will help others who have similar issues.
Our issue was:
- Moving departments from file shares to teams, staff were user MFD scan to file share functionality.
Our immediate response was:
- No problem we can setup Scan to Email, where the the user sends to the Teams / Channel email address
When we did the testing it worked fine.
What we discovered was that our testing (5 pages) and what actually was going on (50 to 100 pages) caused issues.
Small documents - scan to Teams / Channel email : no problem
Big documents - scan to Teams / Channel email : never appeared in the Channel.
So we tried to figure out where the emails went.
It turns out they were going via this route from the MFD scanner to the Teams / Channel :
paper document
put document into MFD scanner
scanner creates PDF and emails it
Middleware software provided by our printer provider gets the email, then sends it to
MS Exchange Mail relay, which accepts the scanner's email and attachment
MS Exchange Mail relay sends the email and attachment out as a valid email to
M365 mail system (which provides some spam removal and protection Reference) which sends it on
to Teams channel
which saves the attachment in '<ChannelName>/Email messages' SharePoint folder
Along the way we found multiple places where LARGE documents were getting stopped.
To get things flowing we did the following:
- To reduce the size of the documents we reduced the default DPI setting on the MFD scanner to 200dpi, but after testing we left the Auto Color setting.
- We found a 20Mb limit on the Middle ware software, which we increased
- We also found a 20Mb limit for our Microsoft exchange mail relay, which we increased
- Though there is a stated limit on the size of emails to channels we haven't seen that come into play in our testing (we're not sure why). Reference
With these settings we found that the scans turned up as attachments in the Teams / Channel. Yeah!
But it took 3 of us (1 user and 2 IT staff) about a week off an on to figure this out, mostly because once the email reaches the M365 world there is no obvious logging / tracking or error notifications.
We are looking at other printer/scanner MFD middleware software that would allow "Scan to sharepoint" based on the printer's logged in user i.e. I go to the printer, fob login, then see a list of all the SharePoint sites I am a member of.
I hope that this helps others who are having similar issues by helping them understand where the scanned attachments may be being stopped.
