Saving Outlook emails in SharePoint & Teams

In this article, we answer the 14 most common needs when saving emails from Microsoft Outlook to SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.

Saving Outlook emails in SharePoint by dragging and dropping them

MacroView allows you to save Outlook e-mails by dragging and dropping them into any SharePoint document library, document set or folder for which you have permission. These areas are displayed in a new pane added to the right-hand side of your desktop Outlook's Mail windows.

Save emails to Teams, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, on-premises SharePoint

MacroView offers excellent integration between desktop Outlook and Microsoft 365 / SharePoint Online (including Teams and OneDrive for Business). You can view and save emails in any SharePoint Online area for which you have permission. In addition, the hybrid version of MacroView also allows you to view and save areas in on-premises SharePoint Server.

Visualise the structure of your SharePoint environment

MacroView automatically discovers all areas for which you have permissions in your SharePoint Online or on-premises SharePoint Server environment. These areas are displayed in a complete and accurate tree structure in a new window to the right of the Mail window in your desktop Outlook.

The MacroView tree structure of a SharePoint Online environment supports hub sites. If you have a large number of Teams site collections, the ability to arrange site collections into hub-site groups and to hide nominated hub sites makes visualisation and navigation much easier.

Unlike many other solutions, you don't need to register each site collection - MacroView discovers them for you. The MacroView tree view can be extended to multiple Office 365 tenancies and multiple web applications supported by on-premises SharePoint servers. No need to select folders or document sets from a drop-down list after dragging them into a document library.

MacroView's Search Site Tree lets you quickly search and navigate to a SharePoint area based on part of its title or name. Thanks to the way it uses the SharePoint search engine, finding via Search Site Tree remains fast even when the SharePoint structure grows to thousands of site collections, sites, libraries, document sets and folders.

MacroView shows all areas you have permission for as you navigate through each level in the SharePoint tree.

MacroView supports Favorites and Recents. Favorites can be organised into groups - like favourites in a web browser - and are a good way to visualise the areas you use often and navigate to them quickly. You can right-click in the MacroView tree to create your own favourites, or favourites can be automatically created for you by the Push Favorites mechanism.

See which e-mails are already stored in SharePoint

MacroView Message sets a yellow 'Saved to SharePoint' category on an e-mail when it is saved in SharePoint. This is the case both when a copy of the e-mail is saved (i.e. the original e-mail remains in the Outlook folder) and when the MacroView software is configured to delete the e-mail from the Outlook folder when saving it to SharePoint. In the latter case, the yellow category appears on the e-mail in Outlook's Deleted Items folder.

In addition to the yellow 'Saved to SharePoint' category, the MacroView software also sets a second category whose value is the URL of the area in SharePoint where the e-mail was saved.

Recognisable display of saved e-mails

With MacroView, you can easily update your existing SharePoint libraries or create new libraries with metadata and views so that saved e-mails are displayed with their To, From, Subject and Received Time attributes. Very similar to how emails are displayed in your Outlook Inbox or Sent Items folders. When you click on an e-mail in SharePoint, MacroView displays a formatted preview at the bottom of the main central window of the Outlook Mail window - again very similar to how e-mails may be displayed in your Inbox or other Outlook folders.

If you click on the column heading Subject in the Emails view, the emails are ordered by Conversation Topic, so that all emails in the same discussion group are grouped in descending order of Time Received. The Re: and FW: prefixes in the email subjects are ignored - just like when sorting the emails in your Inbox by Subject.

Double-clicking an e-mail in a MacroView file list will retrieve that e-mail from SharePoint and reopen it in Outlook, exactly as it was when it was stored in SharePoint. You can then simply reply and forward.

Saving e-mails in EML format

MacroView supports saving e-mails in EML format. This format is preferred because e-mails in EML format can be opened on a mobile device.

MacroView also supports saving in MSG format. E-mails in both MSG and EML formats are found when you search.

Saving e-mails in SharePoint without asking for metadata

If you handle a lot of emails, you will appreciate the way MacroView software is designed to automatically capture metadata while saving emails in SharePoint. All non-personal attributes of the email (i.e. To, CC, BCC, From, Subject, Conversation Theme, Sent on, Received time, Importance, Sensitivity, etc.) can be captured by MacroView without requiring user input.

This automatic registration is done on condition that the destination document library contains the relevant e-mail content type and metadata columns. This content type and these columns can easily be added to a new or existing document library using the Right-click > Provision command.

MacroView can be custom configured so that it registers other email attributes and so that the metadata columns can have the names you want. This is useful if your libraries already have metadata columns with names other than MacroView's, for example because you initially used a competitor's product.

A well-designed SharePoint e-mail environment will also enable the automatic recording of other metadata such as client code, client name, project number, project name, project type, project start date, etc.).

As we will see below, these automatically recorded metadata are very useful when you need to retrieve an e-mail.

Using metadata to find emails in SharePoint

MacroView makes it easy to filter and sort the files in a SharePoint Online library based on the values of their metadata attributes (and using the content of the emails). This also applies to metadata attributes that are automatically captured (see previous section). This 'slicing and dicing' is a great way to zoom in and find a searched-for e-mail within a document library, document set or folder.

With MacroView's search mode, e-mails and documents can be found in any SharePoint area for which you have permission. Emails can be found based on their metadata and content. As with the aforementioned slice-and-dice technique, these metadata include the automatically captured attributes of the emails (e.g. To, From, Subject, Time of Receipt). You can click on a search result to see a formatted preview of that e-mail. If you right-click on a search result, you can choose Open File Location, which will automatically navigate you to the SharePoint area where the search result is stored. This is a great way to see the other documents and emails stored for the client, project, case or matter.

MacroView sends searches to the SharePoint Search Engine - no need to create additional search indexes or perform special crawls.

The list of search types available in the MacroView search mode can easily be expanded - e.g. to include a search type that allows you to search for emails and documents based on custom metadata attributes - e.g. customer name, project number, project type, project start date, etc. As mentioned under the previous heading, these metadata attributes can also be registered automatically when e-mails and attachments are saved in SharePoint.

Prevention of duplicates

A real benefit of MacroView is how it prevents duplicate copies of an email in any given area of the SharePoint email and document store. MacroView achieves this by the way it automatically names the EML or MSG files it creates to store the saved emails. If multiple recipients try to save the same e-mail to the project area, only one copy of the e-mail is saved, but all recipients see the yellow Saved to SharePoint category on the e-mail in their Inbox.

Saving e-mails in bulk in the background

MacroView allows you to select multiple emails in an Outlook folder and save them to a SharePoint area using drag and drop. This bulk saving runs in the background, so you can continue working in Outlook while the saving takes place. This saves a lot of time when you are archiving your emails at the end of a busy week or project.

Save e-mails including attachments

The default configuration of MacroView ensures that the entire email message is stored in SharePoint - 'complete' means that any attachments to that email in Outlook are embedded in the email stored in SharePoint. These embedded attachments are visible at the top of formatted email previews (see Trusted view of already saved emails, above). They are also present in the e-mail when that e-mail is retrieved from SharePoint by double-clicking.

The Find e-mail command in MacroView (see Using metadata to help find e-mails in SharePoint) finds an e-mail in SharePoint based on text in the main text or in attachments (provided those attachments contain searchable text).

Store e-mails and attachments separately

Sometimes you need to save an e-mail's attachment(s) separately from the e-mail - for example, because you want to edit that attachment or attach it to another new e-mail. MacroView allows you to save attachments separately. You can save one or several attachments. The MacroView software examines the metadata definition of the destination area before saving and requests metadata accordingly. MacroView supports all types of metadata you can have in SharePoint.

If you save multiple attachments, you can tick a box and have common metadata applied to multiple attachments. As with bulk email saving, bulk attachment saving happens in the background, so you can keep working in Outlook while the saving continues.

When saving attachments, file system attributes (such as Created, Last Modified and Author) can also be captured automatically. This overcomes one of the frustrations of people moving their File Shares to SharePoint, namely that the Creation Date becomes the date you loaded the file to SharePoint, and the original Creation Date is lost in the file system.

If the file name of an attachment contains characters that are illegal in SharePoint, they are automatically deleted, without a confusing error message from SharePoint. If the destination library contains the correct metadata column, the original un-cropped file name containing the illegal characters is automatically recorded and then re-recorded when the file is later retrieved from SharePoint and added as an attachment to an outgoing e-mail. This way, a customer does not know that the illegal characters had to be removed to save the attachment in SharePoint.

You can also change the name of an attachment while saving it in SharePoint. This is especially relevant when you save a PDF with a scanned image sent to you by a smart copier - the incoming attachment will be a number (or date plus number) and not so usable.

If you save an attachment to a version-controlled space in SharePoint, you can ensure that that attachment is saved as the next version of an existing document, even if the incoming attachment has a different name from the existing file in SharePoint.

Automatically saving e-mails in SharePoint

Being able to drag and drop emails to SharePoint is good, but it is even better if emails can be saved to SharePoint automatically! MacroView offers several ways to automate saving emails in SharePoint:

• Personalised e-mail archiving rules - Each MacroView user can define their own rules for archiving the emails they send and receive. These personal e-mail archiving rules are similar to Outlook's own archiving rules - e.g. if the From address of an incoming e-mail contains '@MacroView365', the incoming e-mail will be stored in the SharePoint area corresponding to MacroView.
• Predictive Email Filing - An optional module available when deploying with an on-premises SharePoint Server. MacroView can suggest storage locations for an incoming e-mail based on the From address and for an outgoing (i.e. Sent) e-mail based on the first To address. A filing tag corresponding to the storage location is added to the subject of the saved e-mail, which automatically saves subsequent e-mails with that tag.
• Corporate Email Filing - an optional module available when used with SharePoint Online or on-premises SharePoint. MacroView supports the same types of archiving as Personal archiving rules and also adds and recognises archiving tags, just like MacroView.

Saving e-mails from a shared mailbox

Many users have one or more secondary mailboxes in their Outlook Mail environment. These secondary mailboxes can be for a colleague (e.g. the Executive supporting a Personal Assistant) or shared mailboxes (e.g. sales@bedrijf.nl). A MacroView user can drag and drop emails into these secondary mailboxes to save them in SharePoint.

MacroView can monitor one or more secondary mailboxes, as well as the user's own (primary) mailbox. This allows e-mails to be automatically archived when they arrive in the InBox or Sent Items folder of a secondary mailbox.