More on email and Document Libraries

I get a lot of mail from people trying to find good solutions for handling mail with Sharepoint. The alternatives are pretty in the open as described in my previous posts, but Rob Clark found another twist to the issue.

Rob started out experimenting with the mail-enabled document libraries and quickly discovered that only attachements emailed into the public folders were picked up by the SPS crawler. Files placed directly into the public folder stays put. This forced him to discard the approach and Rob solved it by using the Explorer view of the document library.

Doing this is acheives the same as the IE trick, and it makes it possible to drag and drop entire file structures into the document libraries, from disk or Exchange. Another bonus, Rob points out, is that you can drag in shortcuts to Outlook calendars and such aswell. The headache in using this approach is that any filenames with funny characters like the ampersand (and I persume also extended unicode like norwegian ÆØÅ characters which have caused problems before) will make the copying fail.

The interesting thing about this is that people seem to find all kinds of ways to work around existing weaknesses in Sharepoint. This will prove a challenge for Microsoft in designing SPS v.Next, to accomodate the different habits users get through these alternatives. A great solution for some might be unacceptable for others.