Port old Exchange based business process to SharePoint Online

[Jacques van der Hoven]

We've just taken over a customer's O365 tenant and the first challenge we face involves a business process where they make use of Exchange for processing customer requests by using a multitude of mailboxes and shared mailboxes with around 30Gb of data (on each desktop). 

It's a bookkeeping/accounting company. 

The process is quite simple: 

1. Customer sends email requesting an action to be taken, e.g. send monthly statements
2. Processing department agent picks up the email and moves it to a shared mailbox called Processing 2016 into a folder called To Do
3. If they processing agent is able to fulfill the request they do so and then move the email to a customer specific folder in the same Shared Mailbox. 
4. If not the email remains in the To Do folder and a job card is opened for the request, but once completed the same process applies of moving the email to the relevant customer folder

Very simple and apparently worked fine with Exchange on-premise, but considering that each processing agent has around 9 mailboxes/shared mailboxes open and combined these mailboxes take up around 30Gb of space AND considering the fact that Microsoft has no data centers in South Africa, this becomes an issue. 

I considered creating a Customers SharePoint site collection and within that a dedicated SharePoint site for each customer with a site mailbox. I tested this though and the performance in Outlook is appauling. More importantly though the actual process would be changed quite sygnificantly for the processing agent. 

So my next thought is to still stick with the Customers SharePoint Site Collection with dedicated SharePoint sites for each customer, but have a Task list at the Customers level and perhaps a single site mailbox at this level. But, what I need to achieve is a simple process to follow that is fast and reliable. 

Objectives: 

1. If the email received by the processing agent is an actionable item, move, or copy, it to the Customers SharePoint site Document library
2. Create a task in the Task List with the following details
   1. Sender address
   2. Subject
   3. Content
   4. Link to original email now found in the document library
   5. Status
   6. Assigned To
3. When a task is assigned or a person assumes responsibility for it the status is changed and that person receives a notification email
4. Once the task is complete the status is changed to Complete upon which the task is moved to a separate list (I'm still considering options here but the main To Do task list shouldn't be clogged up with old items even though you can filter the list by 'Active' tasks only)

Considerations and Challenges:

Setting up the SharePoint site collection, sites, lists and document libraries is easy enough, but I'm trying to figure out how I can Automate step 1 and 2. Steps 3 and 4 should be easy enough with Flow. 

Considering that we will have a site mailbox for the main Customers site, we could perhaps have each processing agent drag and drop actionable items into the site mailbox but I still think it would be nicer if there was an Outlook plugin that could do this. 

Opening a SharePoint Document Library in Outlook also doesn't seem to help because it's readonly and doesn't allow the user to drop email items into it. You can right click and copy the item to the library but it seems to copy it as a post which doesn't show up in the Document Library online anyway. 

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jacques van der Hoven,

Have you considered outlook/SharePoint integration products like:

• Harmon.ie (https://harmon.ie)
• OneplaceMail (http://www.oneplacesolutions.com/)
• Colligo (https://www.colligo.com)

[#3]

Custom PowerShell script may a pretty good way to do it, we are doing similar things to that with a few shared mailboxes / sharepoint sites on a job that runs every hour, grabs the email attachment and email details (sender, date, subject, etc).

Not positive how to download the full email itself, but we capture the body of the email as HTML and populate that instead (like in a multiline field).

Would take some thought on handling multiple customers/multiple sites, etc.

[#4]

+1 to Brent approach...also think carefully about using site mailboxes since is not clear the direction Microsoft is taking with them...natural replacement are Office 365 Groups

[#5]

I have actually started investigating some products yes. I think it's going to be the best option. Now I just need to map the each product to the business process and see which one will deliver the best results.

[#6]

I would have liked to keep this as an automated approach but I think there is a level of manual effort required on the user's part so a third party product with outlook integration might actually be what I'm looking for. That or custom developing a solution, but that will be more costly for the customer.

[#7]

I noticed on another thread the user said that Microsoft is deprecating site mailboxes which is the first I'd heard of it. Thanks for the heads up, definitely steered me away from this as a possible solution.