Integrate SharePoint into Your Exchange Environment

Viewing Document Libraries via Explorer
Although our company's users are generally familiar with Web applications and the idiosyncrasies of working in a particular Web browser, most are far more comfortable working with Windows Explorer, the My Documents folder, and network shares. Fortunately, SharePoint lets users connect to document libraries through Windows Explorer, which gives the users a comfortable view into the SharePoint libraries.

To access a SharePoint document library via Explorer, you simply click the link to a Web folder in the user's My Network Places folder, as Figure 5 shows. Although this view is convenient for users, it poses a potential problem. A document added to a library via an Explorer-style drag-and-drop operation doesn't prompt for metadata (e.g., a status column indicating a document's review status). Therefore, examine the document library's columns to know what metadata your document library might require before adding these Web folders to your users' My Network Places.

To enable users to access Share-Point document libraries via Windows Explorer, you can either do so by using a Group Policy Object (GPO) or by adding a Web-folder link to your SharePoint document library to your users' list of My Network Places. To add a Web folder manually, open the My Network Places folder and start the Add Network Place Wizard. To learn more about using a Windows 2003 GPO to provide access to document libraries via Explorer as well as where to get the latest Group Policy Management Console (GPMC), visit the Windows 2003 Group Policy section on TechNet (http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/technologies/featured/gp/default.mspx).

Email-Enabled Document Libraries
Most Exchange users are familiar with using Exchange public folders as a repository for publicly available messages and documents. SharePoint's ability to capture and display messages helps it fit easily into your users' culture. Users can save important email in public folders and SharePoint document libraries. To save an email message in a document library from Outlook 2003, you simply select File, Save As from inside the message, and you'll see a screen like that in Figure 6. Notice that you can save a message in multiple formats, such as an HTML or email file type. When you save the message, choose the correct Network Place that corresponds to a document library to save it in, and future users of that document library can read the message as if it had been saved in a public folder.

Another easy way to help users become more comfortable with Share Point is to create an email-enabled document library. This is really a mail-enabled Exchange public folder that uses built-in SharePoint functionality to copy all message attachments into a SharePoint document library. Because the public folder actually has an email address assigned to it, any user can post new documents in the document library.

Thanks to the flexibility of Exchange's security settings, you can even allow users who typically wouldn't have permissions to post to the SharePoint document library—such as users outside your organization—to do so. Documents in the mail-enabled public folder are automatically inserted in the document library, which displays the document, the From address, the original message's subject, and the date and time the attachment was copied to the document library. A mail-enabled public folder can be especially useful with Microsoft Office InfoPath forms and XML information. Users simply mail the XML document to the email address associated with the public folder, and the document is automatically copied to the document library, where it's available for automated aggregation and reporting.

When planning your email-enabled document libraries, you need to consider a few points. Email and accompanying attachments can cross firewall boundaries, so that any user or external sender can post new documents, but this capability also exposes SharePoint to possible spam messages and viruses. To protect your SharePoint portal, be sure to set up junk email filters in Exchange and virus scanning in both SharePoint and Exchange. Controlling access rights to the email-enabled document library is a double-duty task, as you now have to administer security rights on the document library itself via SharePoint Services and the public-folder posting-security rights via the Exchange user management tools. A good practice is to use your Active Directory (AD) groups to help with the management of both SharePoint cross-site groups (i.e., custom security groups that can be applied to more than one Web site) and Exchange.

Public folder postings that are mailed to a public folder frequently contain both the document attachment and text in the message body. However, only the attachment is copied to the document library in SharePoint. If you want to save the message text in the document library, you need to save it manually into the library via a Network Places link or an HTTP path.

Since documents are actually copied from the Exchange public folder to the SharePoint document library, storage requirements on the server are doubled as the document is now stored both in Exchange and Share-Point. Consider using quotas to control the size of the SharePoint site. Otherwise, you might find yourself frequently cleaning up the public folders.

One final point to keep in mind: Using email-enabled document libraries is a one-way process. New documents and updates to documents aren't copied from the Share-Point document library back to the Exchange public folder. This is also true of the Exchange Web Parts: You can't use the Web Parts to create new messages, tasks, or calendar events; only to view a mail folder's contents.