You compose a new email, address it to your team and attach the Excel spreadsheet. You’re in a hurry and just need to flick an email off to your team with the sales forecast that you whipped up in Excel. Here’s a great use case that shows just how powerful OnePlaceMail can be in driving adoption of SharePoint and breaking bad habits. Most of us know we should at least consider storing a file in SharePoint and sending a link rather than just attaching the file and emailing it out. Including documents as attachments is just as simple as inserting links, on the Insert from SharePoint window simply select one or more documents and click Insert as Attachment.Įncourage the use of SharePoint and sending links rather than attachments There are some cases however where this is required, such as sending an email to someone outside the company who does not have access to your SharePoint environment.
Whenever possible I would recommend including a link to a SharePoint document in favor of retrieving the file from SharePoint and including it as an attachment to the email. Inserting SharePoint Documents as Attachments This allows documents to be moved or relocated without breaking links. If you have enabled the SharePoint 2010 Document Id feature, OnePlaceMail will automatically detect this and use the static URL provided by the Document Id feature. Link to document using the Static URL (Document Id URL) Which results in an absolute URL that’s encoded (I chose a shallow site structure so I could fit it in my screenshot ) I think you’ll agree this is a lot nicer than the out-of-the-box SharePoint offering of Send To | E-mail a Link Inserting both a link to the document and a link to the document properties results in The label of the inserted link will use the file name (Name in SharePoint) if linking directly to the document, or the Title if linking to the document properties.Ĭonsider the following document in SharePoint These options are available to you whether you have browsed or searched to find the document using OnePlaceMail. OnePlaceMail does, providing the options to “Link to document” or “Link to document properties”.
the SharePoint page containing the metadata and then the user can easily open the document in one click if they want to) SharePoint simply doesn’t give you a way to do this. I often find myself wanting to link someone to the Item Properties (i.e. The standard linking mechanism within SharePoint for document libraries always uses the URL directly to the document file. What would you like to link to? You now have options
Simply right-click on the item either from a browse or search and open it in a browser. You’ve found the file or item in SharePoint, or have you? Want to quickly check before you insert it. No problem, the Insert from SharePoint window provides an awesome search tool complete with hit-highlighting of results and scoping search to site-collection, site, or library/list.Īs with a browsing operation to find our files, from the search results we can select one or multiple files to insert. Not sure where that files is in SharePoint? Either you didn’t create it and put it into SharePoint, or you’ve long since forgotten where you put it. During testing we ran it through inserting over 1000 links in a single operation, not that we are expecting many users to go that far but rest assured it will handle it nicely (and save you about a week over having to do it manually!) Job done, the links are now inserted into our emailĪs we saw in the screenshots above, we can select one or multiple files to insert in a single operation. Then select the SharePoint file(s) from the OnePlaceMail Insert window and choose to Insert as Link When composing an email simply click on the Insert from SharePoint button Inserting SharePoint Content into an Emailįirst let’s look at the mechanism, then we’ll explore the options. In this article I’m going to look at the different ways OnePlaceMail is now allowing you access and link to content in SharePoint in a much more user friendly way.
OnePlaceMail Release 6.2 has introduced some great new features to help with these issues.īefore you stop reading thinking “I don’t have OnePlaceMail and I don’t want to buy a product” The Express Edition of OnePlaceMail is entirely free (it’s not a trial or time limited) – just download it and you’ll be happily accessing SharePoint from your desktop in minutes. One of the pain points of having content stored in SharePoint is being able to easily access and use the content in your desktop applications.įor example, you’re mid way through writing an email and you want to include a link to a file that you know is in SharePoint, better start up that browser and start clicking… It’s just not as easy as it should be, is it?