Save/attach from emails in MS Outlook 2016 to SharePoint site

[Angus Hamilton]

Hi there

Appreciate this has been discussed before, but are there any updates planned to the interaction between Outlook and SharePoint?

We're rolling out SharePoint as a file store for our documents, but a common issue is saving to/attaching from emails direct to SharePoint. 

Options are:

1.  Use the File Sync tool - but we've had some bad experience with files not updating/syncing so there's some resistance to this

2. Use a third party tool - harmon.ie or OnePlace

3.  Use the 'Sites' weblocation in Outlook - but this only shows 'recent sites' which is pretty useless.

If the Sites option in Outlook had a selection/browse capability it would resolve all our requirements - any plans to do this ?

thanks

Angus

[#2 · Accepted solution]

This is now possible using the Outlook Desktop and modern browsers - take a look: https://jonasbjerke.wordpress.com/2019/09/06/you-can-now-drag-e-mails-from-outlook-directly-to-share...

[#3]

@Jonas Vestergaard Bjerke Hansen - thanks a lot for highlighting this - this seems to work really well! It maybe an old thread, but thanks for taking the time to update it.

[#4]

I@Jonas Vestergaard Bjerke Hansen 
Indeed Outlook + Chrome (since version 76 released around 30 July 2019) or Outlook + Edge allow users to drag and drop emails and/or attachments directly from Outlook to SharePoint. See also various posts on uservoice.
It does not work with IE11 or FireFox. It also does not work on macOS. The emails are uploaded as msg files. Separate tools are necessary in case the email metadata needs to be extracted and captured into SharePoint columns.
Paul | SLIM Applications

[#5]

That's for sure, but it can be implemented very simple by using a remote event receiver that parses the msg files and write data back to SharePoint. We have a few customers with a working solution already!

[#6]

The main issue regarding this is that many reply emails have the same subject which creates a name clash when dragging to SharePoint (or any filing system).

[#7]

That is true. But if you extract the metadata from the e-mail itself, you can easily extend the functionality to rename the msg file based on your needs (to make it unique to accomodate your business requirement)

[#8]

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@Deleted wrote:
... if you extract the metadata from the e-mail itself, you can easily extend the functionality to rename the msg file based on your needs ...

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@Deleted that is true but my response was to the drag/drop capability now available. You cannot do what you suggest as far as I know with drag/drop. If there is a way, hopefully you can let me know.

I've also been looking for a good solution but most of the solutions given here and elsewhere are fairly clunky from a UX perspective. Certainly not as frictionless as drag/drop or Outlook's quick steps.

In the end, I realised that I was having to use a hybrid Exchange setup anyway so modern Outlook apps aren't even available and I would have to write something in VBA. I don't have the time or energy to spend on a project like that right now I'm afraid. Maybe I'll try and look for some other tools that I could use to automate things.

[#9]

@Julian Knight 
What kind of naming convention for uploaded emails would be intuitive? combine the subject and sent date, or ...

thanks
Paul | SLIM Applications (https://www.slimapplications.com)

[#10]

Hi Julian,

No out of the box, but you can easily develop a "Remote Event Receiver" that is triggered whenever you archive an e-mail. That way, you can extract the metadata from the email and save it as metadata in SharePoint, but also force a naming convention (eg. rename the file immediately) in SharePoint.

That way, the end user doesn't have to do anything but dragging the e-mail to the desired location in SharePoint.

If you are limited to using older versions of Outlook (that doesn't have this new capability) you might want to buy an "old school" add-in (VSTO) say Harmon.IE for example.

[#11]

Thanks for the reply Jonas.

Does the "Remote Event Receiver" code sit in SharePoint or in Outlook?

It is something that I'm not aware of but would like to investigate.

[#12]

Neither of those. An Remote Event Receiver (or a webhook) is running outside of SharePoint, but triggers on events from within SharePoint - say a document or e-mail was uploaded. You can then react to that trigger and do whatever you like, for example extracting metadata from a MSG file. You can read more about Remote Event Receivers https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/solution-guidance/use-remote-event-receivers-in-shar...

You are also welcome to reach out. We do develop these kind of things for a lot of companies and this scenario is definately something we have done before.

[#13]

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@Paul de Jong wrote:

@Julian Knight 
What kind of naming convention for uploaded emails would be intuitive? combine the subject and sent date, or ...

thanks
Paul | SLIM Applications (https://www.slimapplications.com)

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Thanks for responding Paul. Probably a text representation of the sent date/time I would think as this is pretty unlikely to generate a name clash.

Something like 

subject - yyyymmdd-hhmmss

[#14]

@Julian Knight 

I came across you post, and since it’s from 2019 you may already have solved your issue.

We have had the same issue and have searched for solutions for the last year without finding one. Hence, we decided to develop a solution that match many of the needs that can’t be achieved by using standard drag and drop feature to save email to SharePoint/Teams.

So if you still looking for a free solution you are welcome to reach out.

Steen – (https://axpoint.com)

[#15]

@SteenWestergaard 

There are already quite some tools in this space. See e.g. here

The tools range from Outlook Add-ins (e.g. Colligo) to SharePoint Add-ins (e.g. Email Manager) to SharePoint apps (e.g. Explorer).

Many organisations are not aware that they can drag and drop emails and/or attachments directly to SharePoint (or OneDrive for Business) when they use Chrome or Edge. This only provides basic functionality though and they need a tool when they want to control the naming, extract email metadata, ...
Paul

[#16]

Thanks for that, I will have a look.

[#17]

One thing to note is the new ability to add a link to a SharePoint document library to your OneDrive. It appears as a link folder in OneDrive. So you can now use the Outlook/OneDrive integration for SharePoint as well.

Not suggesting this is a full answer by any means but it may be useful to some people.

[#18]

Any update on this? We are running into same issue.

[#19]

Hi Angus,
I might be a bit biased, but it sounds like we might be able to help you out in a fairly frictionless way.
https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/web-apps/colligonetworksinc1590513490509.sol-3139-kzl
Thanks,

[#20]

In classic SharePoint, we could drag an email directly from Outlook into a SharePoint List Item. Now, in the modern view, we can't figure out how to do that. The only solution seems to be clicking on add an attachment, but that is nearly impossible to navigate to an email if it hasn't been saved some place. Does anyone have a simple solution to this problem created by the modern experience?

[#21]

@Jonas Vestergaard Bjerke Hansen 

The drag and drop from Outlook to SharePoint will get the email over, but no metadata properties that would be helpful for searching/filtering the email later. The new 365 version of Colligo email manager add-in enables a single click copy of one or more emails plus attachments (embedded or separated from the emails) and will include all the typical metadata useful for sorting and filtering (Subject, Sent/Received date, Sender, Recipients, etc. ) and you and append other tags easily to further categorize (e.g. Project ID, follow up actions, comments, plus retention labels if needed). Send and file is also a cool way of capturing your outgoing emails too that need to be shared and preserved. 

SharePoint Microsoft 365 Integration | Mobile & Desktop (colligo.com)