Help us test Cloud Attachments in Outlook 2016 with SharePoint Server 2016

Microsoft

Hi everyone,

 

My name is Steven Lepofsky, and I’m an engineer on the Outlook for Windows team. We have released to Insiders support for Outlook 2016’s Cloud Attachment experience with SharePoint Server 2016. We need your help to test this out and give us your feedback!

 

So, what do I mean by “cloud attachments?”  Let’s start there.

 

The Cloud Attachment Experience Today

Back when we shipped Outlook 2016, we included a refreshed experience for how you can add attachments in Outlook.  To recap, here are a few of the new ways Outlook helped you to share your files and collaborate with others:

 

We added a gallery that shows your most recently used documents and files. Files in this list could come from Microsoft services such as OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint hosted in Office 365 or your local computer.  When you attach these files, you have the option of sharing a link to the file rather than a copy.  With the co-authoring power of Microsoft Office, you can collaborate in real time on these documents without having to send multiple copies back and forth.

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Is the file you’re looking for not showing up in the in the recent items list? Outlook includes handy shortcuts to Web Locations where your file might be stored:

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And in a recent update, we gave you the ability to upload files directly to the cloud when you attach a file that is stored locally:

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Adding Support for SharePoint Server 2016

Until now, Cloud Attachments were only available from Office 365 services or the consumer version of OneDrive. We are now adding the ability to connect to SharePoint Server 2016, so you can find and share files from your on-premises SharePoint server in a single click. We’d love your help testing this out before we roll it out to everyone!

 

The new experience will match what we have today, just with an additional set of locations. Once setup, you’ll have new entries under Attach File -> Browse Web Locations.  These will show up as “OneDrive for Business” for a user’s personal documents folder, and “Sites” for team folders. 

 

Note: If you also happen to be signed in to any Office365 SharePoint or OneDrive for Business sites under File -> Office Account, both sites may show up. The difference will be that the Office 365 versions will have branding for your company.  For example, it may say “OneDrive – Contoso” rather than “OneDrive for Business”, or “Sites – Contoso” rather than “Sites.”

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You’ll be able to upload locally attached files to the OneDrive for Business folder located on your SharePoint Server.

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And, of course, you’ll see recently used files from your SharePoint server start to show up in your recently used files list.

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How to get setup

Here are the necessary steps and requirements to start testing this feature out:

  1. This scenario is only supported if you are also using Exchange Server 2016.  You’ll need to configure your Exchange server to point to your SharePoint Server 2016 Internal and/or External URLs.  See this blog post for details: Configure rich document collaboration using Exchange Server 2016, Office Online Server (OOS) and Sha...
  2. You’ll need Outlook for Windows build 16.0.7825.1000 or above.
  3. Ensure that your SharePoint site is in included in the Intranet zone.
  4. Optional: Ensure that crawling is enabled so that your documents can show up in the recent items gallery. Other features such as uploading a local attachment to your site will work even if crawling is not enabled.  See this page for more details: Manage crawling in SharePoint Server 2013

Once enrolled, any mailbox that boots up Outlook and is configured with your SharePoint Server’s information per step #1 above will start to see the new entry points for the server.

 

We hope you enjoy this sneak peek, and please let us know how this is working for you in the comments below!

5 Replies

Will this be available for our Office 365 tenant as well? (we use SharePoint Online)

 

Also, why not call it 'SharePOint instead of 'Sites'? I would encourage you to be consistent in your naming of the features. 

Hi Gro,

 

This is already available for O365 tenants.  If you click on File -> Office Account -> Add a Service -> Storage -> Office 365 SharePoint, you will be able to sign in to your O365 SharePoint site.  You may already be signed in to it, in some cases, such as if you already signed in to Office with that account.

 

As for the naming, it matches what you will see for Office 365 accounts.  In fact, if you follow the steps above, it will say "Sites" in the same location (under Office Account) once signed in.

 

I'll definitely take your point back to the team though about why the name becomes "Sites" after you are signed in.  Thanks for the feedback!

 

Thanks,

-Steven

Not directly on-topic either.

 

Can you point me to a roadmap item for the same functionality in OWA in 365? There's no attach from SharePoint — the only sources are OneDrive, Group files, or Computer. I and many of my users across multiple companies use OWA a lot, and ateaching from SharePoint is greatly missed.

 

Talks at Ignite talked about adding even third-party cloud storage system there, but not even in-tenant SharePoint Sites is present yet.

When clicking on Attach file / Web Locations / Sites (name of company), I get an overview of 'Recent folders'. However, they are not my recent folders. Some of them are document libraries that I haven't accessed since June! The sites or document libraries that I actually accessed earlier today, do not appear in this overview at all.

 

When it comes to the 'Save (files) to' option, I miss a 'Save to SharePoint' option. We are working really hard to make our users understand the difference between OneDrive (for personal work files and ad-hoc sharing) versus SharePoint (for corporate team files for regular collaboration and sharing). Now there's only a 'Save to OneDrive' option which doesn't exactly ease the understanding of the differences - quite the opposite it blurs the boundaries between the two tools and from a UX point of view this is confusing for the end users.