Managing documents and emails in Office 365

MacroView enables Office 365-based document and email management solutions that offer impressive functionality and an intuitive user experience. These SharePoint Online solutions will meet many organisations' need for better management of their documents and emails compared to shared network drives and Outlook folders.

Intuitive, precise tree structure of your online SharePoint document storage

To get started, define your Office 365 tenancy to MacroView by entering its URL. The MacroView software then automatically discovers and displays all site collections within that tenancy for which you have permissions - you don't need to define each site collection to MacroView. You can click to expand each site collection in much the same way as you click to expand a folder structure in Windows Explorer or Outlook. As you expand, you will see the subsites, document libraries, document sets and folders nested in that site collection - only those you have permission for.

When you click on a document library, document set or folder, MacroView displays the default view - with the columns, filtering and sorting order defined in SharePoint. You can see all views defined in SharePoint. You will not see files for which you do not have permissions.

By clicking on the heading of a column, you can sort the view in descending or ascending order of the values in that column. You can also filter by the values in a column. MacroView shows a formatted preview when you click on most types of documents or e-mail. In short, MacroView makes it easy to view the contents of any document library, document set or folder for which you have permissions.

If your organisation uses Personal Sites (My Sites), your Office 365 Tenant will have a One Drive for Business area. When you register that One Drive for Business area, your MacroView tree will show the site collections that correspond to the Personal Sites for your colleagues. You will see only those parts of each Personal Site for which you have permissions, and many of those parts have a special colour to indicate that you have read-only access. See Security and permissions below.

In MacroView 365, the expansion of the tree stops when you either reach the edge of the tree or there is a break in the inheritance of permissions. If your Document Store uses the same permissions for all levels in the tree, this will obviously not be a problem. However, if the tree contains permission breaks, there may be nodes deeper in the tree for which you have permission, but which are not displayed for you. If this is a key requirement, you should know that when working with a SharePoint On-Premises environment, MacroView DMF will find and display ALL nodes for which you have permission, including those nodes nested under one or more permission inheritance breaks.

Group By views are supported by MacroView when working with an On-Premises document store, but not yet when working with a SharePoint Online document store.

Windows right-click menus

When you right-click on the entry for a document or e-mail in a file list, MacroView displays a comprehensive menu of options. Working with right-click menus is a familiar experience for any Windows user. MacroView's right-click menu has more options than the menu that appears when you right-click in the SharePoint web-browser UI.

The MacroView right-click menu provides options you would see when right-clicking in Windows Explorer (e.g. Open, Open With, Print, Cut, Copy, Delete, Rename, Properties, etc.) along with additional options enabled by SharePoint (Check Out, Check In, Discard Check Out, Version History) and possibly some custom options (e.g. Workshare...).

The right-click menu is context-sensitive - for example, you will see an Open File Location option when you right-click a search result or the entry for a file in the Recent Files list. This makes it very convenient to navigate to the area in SharePoint (document library, document set or folder) where a search result or recent file is located, so you can see related files.

You will also see a rich right-click menu in the tree view that MacroView displays in browse or favourites mode.

Extensive support for metadata

The ability to capture additional metadata for documents as they are stored, and to use that metadata when searching for documents, is an important element of any document management solution. MacroView provides very good support for metadata in both SharePoint Online and SharePoint On-Premises. This support includes an intuitive Windows-like user interface for capturing and editing metadata.

MacroView also supports Metadata Navigation defined for a document library in a SharePoint Online document repository (and also in an On-Premises document repository). This allows efficient 'slicing and dicing' of the documents in a library, based on their metadata values.

Unique document numbering

The ability to assign a unique Document ID to documents when they are stored and to retrieve a document based on its unique ID is a central requirement of a serious DM solution.

SharePoint comes with a Provider for Unique Document Numbering that generates a unique Document ID for documents. This Provider is available in both SharePoint Online and SharePoint On-Premises. The structure of the unique Document ID is as follows:

• • Prefix that identifies the Site collection where the document was first stored.
  • Number identifying the list (i.e. document library) where the document was first stored.
  • Number identifying the item in that list where the document was first saved.

An example of a unique document ID from a SharePoint Online implementation is shown in the screenshot below:

You can easily include the unique document ID in a link to a document. Even if the document is moved from where it was first stored, the resulting link will still work correctly, provided a SharePoint search has been performed to update the search index and include the document ID at the new storage location.

Version management

The ability to manage multiple versions of a document is another key requirement for a document management solution. In a Windows file share environment, this is often overcome by using multiple file names (RequirementsV1.docx, RequirementsV2.docx, etc.), but it should be possible to keep multiple versions and return to an earlier version where all versions have the same file name.

SharePoint Online allows both Major Only and Major and Minor (Draft) versioning to be defined for a document library, and MacroView DMF supports this. 'Checkout require' can also be defined for a SharePoint Online document library (i.e. documents cannot be opened from the library for editing unless they are checked out). MacroView DMF supports this and continues its default action of automatically checking out when documents are opened for editing (i.e. MacroView DMF removes the need for the user to perform the checkout).

Efficiently navigate an Office 365 document repository

A real strength of MacroView is the way it facilitates working with a large SharePoint document store - i.e. a document store whose tree contains a large number of 'nodes' - be they Site Collections, Sites, Document Libraries, Document Sets or Folders. A really useful command in this context is Search Site Tree. This command uses the power of the SharePoint search engine to quickly find nodes whose titles/names contain certain characters you specify, and then automatically navigates you to the node you select from the search results. The search uses an index, so it remains fast no matter how many nodes there are in your document store, and the navigation works no matter how deeply nested the destination node is, or how far that selected node is from where you were before.