OnePlaceMail 6.4 – Future-proofing, Site Mailboxes (world first), faster SharePoint access, client side view rendering and all the other goodies

Release 6.4 of OnePlaceMail is now publically available for download (both Enterprise Edition and the free Express Edition). I’m very happy to have this release now available to everyone as a lot of effort and changes led by customer feedback has gone into this release. It also represents a longer than normal release cycle for the OnePlaceMail product with almost 6 months going into this release.

This release has already been warmly accepted and rather than me filling you in on what’s new, here’s some of the news stories already out there:

Official OnePlaceMail 6.4 Release Article

Future proof your SharePoint solution with OnePlaceMail R6.4 (ready for download)

OnePlaceMail R6.4 sees a significant focus placed on the speed of access to content stored within SharePoint from desktop applications. The existing Insert from SharePoint, Open from SharePoint and Save to SharePoint windows have seen significant enhancements with support for SharePoint views and column rendering.

Release 6.4 is the first in the world to provided full support for both extending and co-existing with SharePoint 2013 Site Mailboxes. Therefore, allowing you to future-proof solutions you build today.

Many other fantastic enhancements for the capture, classification and access to SharePoint content from desktop applications have also been delivered with a smaller memory footprint and greater overall performance.

 

Wall Street Journal

New SharePoint Solution Addresses Site Mailboxes Limitations

IT departments worldwide still grapple with SharePoint user adoption and question how best to achieve true collaboration and content management. In particular, one of the biggest sticking points seems to be email, which is still a primary business communication tool and one which people use to share, store and search for documents. Microsoft recently attempted to address this challenge with the addition of Site Mailboxes but it falls short. But OnePlaceMail 6.4 dually enhances SharePoint 2013′s best attributes and fills the gaps.

Image and Data Manager (IDM)

Many views of SharePoint with OnePlaceMail 6.4

Scinaptic Communications promises speedier access to content from desktop applications with the latest update to OnePlaceMail, the company’s solution for improving connections between SharePoint and Outlook, Microsoft Office and Windows Explorer.

To support this in Release 6.4, OnePlaceMail’s existing “Insert from SharePoint”, “Open from SharePoint” and “Save to SharePoint” windows have been enhanced with support for SharePoint Views and Column rendering.

Release 6.4 also adds some significant enhancements to the “Insert from SharePoint” Window that multiply the range of ways that content can be viewed and accessed.

TMCNET

OnePlaceMail Helps SharePoint Remove Limitations
As useful a tool as e-mail is, it still has its limits. There are just some things that simply aren’t programmed into it, so there’s nothing that can be done, right? Well, Scinaptic Communications has improved its OnePlaceMail product, helping users bring Microsoft SharePoint to their email and Office environments.
This is a nice step up from the current capabilities of Outlook, Office, and Explorer, helping better link them together and remove many of their limitations. Those who constantly find themselves having to use all of the above will greatly benefit from OnePlaceMail 6.4. This will also help improve adoption of all of them, for those who use one will now be able to benefit further from the others. It’s a situation that should go well for all involved, from the IT Department and on.

CFO World

Local developers target end user adoption issues with world first software

OnePlaceMail 6.4 is the first and only product worldwide that both complements and extends the new SharePoint 2013 Site Mailboxes functionality to overcome critical limitations, such as the inability to capture email attributes when saving emails or their attachments; minimal Microsoft Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) integration; inability to tag content with custom metadata; and no intuitive File Explorer integration.

How to import (upload) an entire folder of files to SharePoint using PowerShell

I often find myself testing different SharePoint access methods to determine which provides the best performance and also need to test how solutions scale with massive amounts of data and the behaviour when SharePoint throttling kicks in. I find the following PowerShell script useful for populating SharePoint document libraries with files from a local drive path. This simple script will loop through all files in a given local folder and upload them to SharePoint. Note this example doesn’t handle folders within folders.

1. Create a folder containing the files to upload to SharePoint

2. Locate the SharePoint library that you want to upload the files to, take note of the:

• Web URL
• Document library URL
• Document library name

3. Copy the following script to be run in a PowerShell window

if((Get-PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell") -eq $null)
{
    Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell
}

#Script settings

$webUrl = "http://vs-server12"

$docLibraryName = "Documents"
$docLibraryUrlName = "Shared%20Documents"

$localFolderPath = "C:\temp\Docs4SharePoint"

#Open web and library

$web = Get-SPWeb $webUrl

$docLibrary = $web.Lists[$docLibraryName]

$files = ([System.IO.DirectoryInfo] (Get-Item $localFolderPath)).GetFiles()

ForEach($file in $files)
{

    #Open file
    $fileStream = ([System.IO.FileInfo] (Get-Item $file.FullName)).OpenRead()

    #Add file
    $folder =  $web.getfolder($docLibraryUrlName)

    write-host "Copying file " $file.Name " to " $folder.ServerRelativeUrl "..."
    $spFile = $folder.Files.Add($folder.Url + "/" + $file.Name, [System.IO.Stream]$fileStream, $true)
    write-host "Success"

    #Close file stream
    $fileStream.Close();
}

#Dispose web

$web.Dispose()

4. Change the PowerShell variables at the top of the script to match your SharePoint upload destination and the location of the folder of files to upload

5. Run the PowerShell script, you should see progress of the uploaded files as shown below

6. After the script completes you should see all of the imported files in your SharePoint document library

Free Webinar – Improve SharePoint End-User Adoption with OnePlaceMail

If you haven’t had the opportunity to see how OnePlaceMail has been making SharePoint users grin from ear-to-ear then I have great news. In addition to the awesome resources available on the OnePlaceMail website, the OnePlaceMail Team are now running free webinars to help you get the most out of your investment in SharePoint and most importantly get your users on side by making SharePoint a joy to use from the desktop.

The next webinar is scheduled for Wed 5 June (4-5pm EDT) and topics covered include:

- Bringing SharePoint to the desktop
- Seamless capture of content
- Streamline content classification
- SharePoint 2013 Site Mailboxes

Don’t miss out, register now for the free webinar.

For those struggling with user adoption of SharePoint, this is what happy users look like…

Photos from the Australian SharePoint Conference

Thanks to everyone who came and visited us at the OnePlaceMail booth. It’s great to hear from our existing customers and how our recent updates have been making your lives easier! A big thank you to all those brave people that came and introduced themselves, I hope we were able to answer your questions and ensure you left the conference with some valuable knowledge and a pathway forward.

James Fox – Metadata with SharePoint Site Mailboxes delivered by OnePlaceMail

OnePlaceMail Silver Sponsor of the 4th Annual SharePoint Conference

Andrew – our happy XBOX winner! Congratulations

Guide to Setting up SharePoint Site Mailboxes on SharePoint 2013 and Exchange 2013

Let’s face it, if you are tasked with setting up the new SharePoint Site Mailboxes for a proof of concept, or in your production environment it’s not a 5 minute exercise and the official documentation provided by Microsoft at this stage is lacking somewhat in detail.

Chances are that you’ve been tasked with setting this up because you are either:

• The SharePoint Guru
• The Exchange Guru
• Someone pretending to be (or forced to be) one of the above

The difficulty I can see with this is that you have to have a decent understanding of both SharePoint and Exchange in order to perform the setup. The setup requires installations and configuration on both the SharePoint Server and the Exchange Server.

With that in mind, the OnePlaceMail team have published a step-by-step guide to setting up SharePoint Site Mailboxes with screenshots every step of the way. The guide takes you from a default SharePoint 2013 server and Exchange 2013 server and goes through the entire process to get them talking to together so that you can start provisioning SharePoint Site Mailboxes.

 

Abstract

This article provides step by step instructions for setting up site mailboxes on-premise.
If you are using Office 365, please skip this article and move to the “Provisioning of a Site Mailbox” article as Office 365 environments have the Exchange and SharePoint pre-requisite configuration described in this article setup already.
This article will be useful for both SharePoint and Exchange administrators as the configuration process involves both environments.
In addition to the original Microsoft article (you can find the reference below) this article provides detailed steps regarding creating self-signed certificates and establishing trust relationships between SharePoint and Exchange with these certificates.

 

New videos – Overcoming the limitations of SharePoint Site Mailboxes

In this previous blog post SharePoint Site Mailbox integration with Outlook – A new way to get email into SharePoint, I introduced the new SharePoint Site Mailbox concept introduced in SharePoint/Exchange/Outlook 2013 and took a look the pros and cons of using this new feature.

The following short videos show how OnePlaceMail 6.4 builds on the SharePoint Site Mailbox concept to deliver an enhanced user experience that overcomes many of the limitations or short comings of Site Mailboxes.

 

1) Capture Email attributes when saving to Site Mailboxes

This video demonstrates how to extend Site Mailboxes in SharePoint 2013 to capture email attributes when saving email messages or email attachments.

 

2) Tag Content with custom metadata when saving to Site Mailboxes

This video demonstrates how to tag content with custom metadata when saving email or email attachments to SharePoint Site Mailboxes from Outlook 2013.

 

3) Save to Site Mailboxes from Windows Explorer and Office Applications

This video demonstrates saving from Windows File Explorer and Microsoft Office (Word, Excel & PowerPoint) into SharePoint Site Mailboxes.

 

4) Access SharePoint capabilities from Site Mailboxes

This video demonstrates how to access SharePoint from within an Outlook 2013 Site Mailbox. The demonstration also shows toggling between the Site Mailbox Exchange Style view and SharePoint View of the current location.

 

5) Manage Email Attachments with Site Mailboxes

This video demonstrates how to replace email attachments with links to items in SharePoint. The video also demonstrates searching SharePoint, include Site Mailboxes to insert or add.

 

Related Posts

Future-proofing your Email/SharePoint Integration Strategy – OnePlaceMail 6.4 Preview

SharePoint Site Mailbox integration with Outlook – A new way to get email into SharePoint

White Paper – SharePoint 2013 Site Mailboxes

Future-proofing your Email/SharePoint Integration Strategy – OnePlaceMail 6.4 Preview

As OnePlaceMail 6.4 Preview hits the streets I wanted to speak about why we believe 6.4 is such a pivotal release. Last year in the lead up to the release of Exchange 2013, Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 we immersed ourselves in the new technologies and the features, functions, and integration points that they brought to the table. We didn’t just want to deliver a OnePlaceMail release that worked the way it always had and ignored the architectural changes that had been made in the 2013 Microsoft stack. So we invested the time, we put down the tools, and really took a step back to look at the new options; How could this benefit the way people are working today and tomorrow? What new business cases could be solved? How could this technology be best applied to solve the issues we are currently solving with OnePlaceMail today? This really forced us to re-evaluate the position that OnePlaceMail has under the new technologies (Outlook 2013, SharePoint 2013, Exchange 2013).

One of the most interesting new features of Outlook 2013/SharePoint 2013 was the concept of SharePoint Site Mailboxes. Microsoft has taken a great step forward (finally) with Site Mailboxes in an attempt to address the integration problem that has always existed between Outlook and SharePoint. Please see this blog post for more details on SharePoint 2013 Site Mailboxes.

After spending quite a bit of time with SharePoint Site Mailboxes we found they satisfied some use cases really well, and others not so well. While Site Mailboxes provided some great out-of-the-box benefits, there were always going to be some limitations as well. If you want to find out more about the benefits and limitations I suggest taking a look at the free whitepaper we published SharePoint 2013 Site Mailboxes – Overcome the limitations.

It came to decision time, and we had a couple of options:

· Option 1 – We could continue enhancing OnePlaceMail as an industry leading product directly integrating Outlook and SharePoint without any dependency on the new Site Mailbox framework. This broadly equated to ignoring Site Mailboxes due to their limitations and positioning OnePlaceMail as an alternate (competitive) solution – you would either use Site Mailboxes or you would use OnePlaceMail

· Option 2 – We could re-architect OnePlaceMail to use Site Mailboxes as a framework and build enhanced functionality on top to overcome the limitations

We concluded that there would be use cases where Site Mailboxes were the logical solution, and other use cases where Site Mailboxes would not work at all, so rather than committing to option 1 or option 2 we decided we needed to do both! We wanted to provide enterprises with a solution that would be consistent and work for them across all their business cases, both those using Site Mailboxes and those that don’t.

This strategic decision gave us focus for the OnePlaceMail 6.4 Preview release. We wanted to deliver the robust enterprise class OnePlaceMail with all its bells and whistles that you know and love, and if you happen to be using Site Mailboxes (now or in future) then we will ‘light up’ a whole set of Site Mailbox specific features and enhancements designed to overcome the limitations that exist with Site Mailboxes out of the box. Even more than that, we also wanted to deliver a seamless and consistent user experience, to the user it shouldn’t matter if they are dragging and dropping an email (or attachment) to a Site Mailbox or another SharePoint location via OnePlaceMail. The decision where and when to use Site Mailboxes will often be an architectural decision, but to the end user (through the Outlook interface) they really just want to capture, classify and access information in SharePoint and don’t care too much whether that is done via an enhanced Site Mailbox framework or OnePlaceMail without Site Mailboxes – we needed to deliver a user interface where both scenarios used the same metaphors, same workflow, same behaviors so that the user intuitively knows how to use it without need for training.

The results of all the hard work are ready for you now. The OnePlaceMail 6.4 Preview release is a free download which we made publically available last week.

There is also a series of short videos showing the new OnePlaceMail Site Mailbox features in action, so if you want to quickly check out what it looks like I’d suggest taking 5 minutes to go through these.

SharePoint Site Mailbox integration with Outlook – A new way to get email into SharePoint

What are SharePoint Site Mailboxes?

The SharePoint Site Mailbox concept is aimed at bringing Exchange emails and SharePoint documents together. So how does it do this?

The SharePoint Interface

A site mailbox can be created at a site level (maximum of 1 mailbox per site). From a navigation point of view the mailbox appears just as though it is another list or library in the SharePoint site.

When you click on the Mailbox link things aren’t as nice and integrated as you would hope. Instead of showing the content of the mailbox within the SharePoint site, as you would the content from a Document Library or List, rather the link simply opens the Site Mailbox in Outlook Web Access. You are taken away from SharePoint to see the content of the Site Mailbox.

 

This now starts to give you an understanding of what’s happening under the covers. When you add a Site Mailbox to a SharePoint site, you are effectively creating a mailbox on the Exchange server and then your site gets a link placed on it.

What is nice, is that the security of the mailbox is tied to the security permissions of your SharePoint site. So if you add or remove a user from your SharePoint site, the appropriate permissions are granted/revoked from the mailbox in Exchange as well.

Unfortunately this is about the extent of the integration of email and documents that you get through the SharePoint user interface, fortunately things will get a lot nicer when we look at things from the Outlook client…

The Outlook Interface

Outlook 2013 has been enhanced to support SharePoint Site Mailboxes. A really nice integration point is the automated rollout of Site Mailboxes directly to your Outlook profile based on your permissions to the SharePoint site. What this means is that if you are an owner or member of a SharePoint site and a Site Mailbox is created, that Site Mailbox will automatically get added to Outlook (even while Outlook is running). If your membership to the site is removed then the mailbox is automatically removed from Outlook as well. The Site Mailbox is represented in Outlook as a new store per site. All this talk of Site Mailboxes is a bit misleading though, because what you are actually getting in Outlook is the Document Libraries from the SharePoint site, not just the mailbox. What do I mean? lets have a look graphically at what you are getting:

When viewing the content of a Site Mailbox, the view presented is the same format and appearance as any other mail folder as shown below:

When viewing SharePoint Document Libraries you see an Outlook view of all the items in the document library as shown below:

This is pretty cool. Exchange and SharePoint perform a synchronization to make this possible and stubs (not the actual file content) is stored in Exchange to make this view possible. Clicking on these items in the Outlook view to open them up then communicates directly to SharePoint to download and open the file.

Subfolders, both within the mailbox and within document libraries are supported.

Read more about what Microsoft has to say on SharePoint Site Mailboxes.

 

Pros and Cons

So now you have a basic grounding in what this integration looks like, what are the benefits and limitations of Site Mailboxes.

Pros

• Site Mailboxes provide a consolidated view of site content stored within SharePoint and Exchange from within Microsoft Outlook
• Minimal change with a familiar drag & drop process to the left navigation of Outlook. Allowing the capture of emails or email attachments into SharePoint and Exchange
• Convenient access to SharePoint content from within Microsoft Outlook using a familiar metaphor of folders on the left navigation of Outlook.
• Ability to include a Site Mailbox as an email recipient (e.g. cc’d) for saving emails into a Site Mailbox – Inbox
• Ability to ‘Forward’ a link to a document within a Site Mailbox or drag/drop multiple documents into an email message.
• Lifecycle Retention policies can be applied at a Site Mailbox level behind the scenes
  Management and Compliance: Site Mailboxes can be part of eDiscovery Search Scopes.
• Minimal change for the end users and therefore greater user adoption and promotion of enterprise content management best practices
• Less reliance on the IT Department once the SharePoint and Exchange environment have been configured for Site Mailboxes
• More efficient means to support the business with records management initiatives
• Streamlined provisioning and deployment of Site Mailboxes to end users based on security permissions within a SharePoint Site
• Email content is retained within Microsoft Exchange while documents are retained within SharePoint

Cons

• Setting up the environment to support Site Mailboxes involves installing and configuring software on both the Exchange and SharePoint servers and setting up trust relationships and having all communication over SSL.
• Probably the biggest drawback is that you are not actually getting email into SharePoint. The email is stored in Exchange. This means you can’t treat it as a SharePoint object and include it as part of a business process. E.g. include it a part of a workflow, add metadata columns to email and build a SharePoint business process around it. I will add quickly that you can drag/drop email directly to a Document Library and this will get the email into SharePoint as an msg file.
• You must be running SharePoint 2013, Exchange 2013 and Outlook 2013 to get access to Site Mailbox functionality
• Very limited features on drag/drop of attachments to SharePoint document libraries – basically no support for metadata of any kind (no content type selection, no columns to complete, no validation of mandatory column, can’t rename files on upload, no support for versioning)
• Viewing of SharePoint content is very limited. You are provided more with a file type view of content rather than a SharePoint view. You can’t show SharePoint columns in the Outlook view, you just get the filename, last modified, size, and checkout status.
• Maximum of 10 Site Mailboxes can be added to Outlook

 

Further Reading

For a more in-depth look at SharePoint Site Mailboxes, and how to overcome some of the limitations I suggest reading the article White Paper – SharePoint 2013 Site Mailboxes

 

Site Mailboxes Aren’t for You – Need a Different Option?

For alternate methods of getting email into SharePoint please refer to my article (written based on SharePoint 2010 options) Five out-of-the-box ways to get Email into SharePoint.

White Paper – SharePoint 2013 Site Mailboxes

Microsoft SharePoint 2013 has introduced a new concept called Site Mailboxes to help bring together Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange content within Microsoft Outlook 2013.

SharePoint Site Mailboxes provide many benefits and also have their limitations. This White Paper: SharePoint 2013 Site Mailboxes – Overcome their Limitations looks at Site Mailboxes and how they can be extended to implement broader solutions on the SharePoint platform.

The White Paper addresses how to enhance Site Mailboxes to:

• Capture email attributes when saving to Site Mailboxes
• Tag Content with custom metadata
• Save to Site Mailboxes from Windows Explorer & Office applications
• Access SharePoint capabilities from Site Mailboxes
• Manage email attachments with Site Mailboxes

 

How HP are using OnePlaceMail to complete the HP TRIM/SharePoint integration story

In a recent blog post Dan Theobald (Business Analyst, HP Information Management team) details the use case of OnePlaceMail in a SharePoint/HP TRIM environment for achieving records management of email records.

Dan continues to explain in detail how HP are internally using OnePlaceMail in a collaborative Help Desk solution built on SharePoint. In this solution OnePlaceMail delivers the front line interface to Help Desk personnel for capturing initial Help Desk tickets, follow up correspondence and also provides access to the information stored in the Help Desk system (SharePoint) directly from within Outlook.

It’s great to hear of these real world scenarios where OnePlaceMail is adding real value, and users are compelled enough to blog about their great experiences with the product! It drives us to make it even better.

Learn more about OnePlaceMail