New Free Add-on For Saving Outlook Attachments to SharePoint – Quest DropThis for SharePoint

Joel Oleson — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 07:44:10 GMT

Quest software in the continued spirit of community awareness has launched it’s newest addition. It’s a client Outlook add-on that makes it super easy to save attachments to SharePoint and instead send links to SharePoint.

This simple screenshot spells it out quite clearly…

The Drop down for the target SharePoint folder can be pre-configured to default to selected to common save locations… including saving up to the last 15 used save locations!

The first option to send only the link – Intranets or for Internet accessible environments
The second to add to SharePoint and include attachment – commonly used when you’re including external people, but you want to have the document on SharePoint for updates and edits.
The third option is the same as default outlook behavior. Simply sending the attachment.

What I like about this nifty little tool is… it’s simple innovation on something I’ve been looking to see innovated since the STS days. Saving to a URL is difficult in the default “save as” dialogue. It isn’t intuative to save to a sharepoint document library. That’s a common training hurdle to overcome and get people in the habbit of doing. The attachment scenario is really hitting at the heart of the file sharing scenario. I think it’s great to see this as a freeware solution. Sure people will come up with clever enhancements. Colligo for example has a great email add-on that allows you to save meta data while saving emails.

The download is a small zip 1.8MB which includes a setup executable that can easily be installed on an XP, Vista, or Windows 7 desktop (requires admin rights to setup). (May require updated .NET framework)

Installation and Configuration options are explained in this easy to follow article called the DropThis mini guide. (Also includes uninstall steps if necessary.)

You can download the Free Quest DropThis for SharePoint 1.0 (a client Outlook add-in) at SharePointForAll.com and click on “Download” on the top right.

Here’s my experience:

1. I downloaded the zip file, made sure outlook was closed, double clicked the zip, ran setup, re-opened outlook, noticed it said loading add-ins

2. Opened up the DropThis mini guide to find out how to configure it. In Outlook “Tools, Options, Quest DropThis for SharePoint” tab put in my SharePoint doc lib, and went with the defaults.

3. Opened up an email, clicked attach (expected to see dialog box) I figured out it’s after you click send (reading the mini guide again :)) Chose to send link only.

4. Clicked send.

5. Looked at the email in my sent items:

Quest DropThis has uploaded the following attachments into SharePoint:
Notes.txt (link was actually hot) it didn’t throw an ugly URL in.

I thought it was going to choke on configuring it to my internet blog shared documents which does prompt for auth (not integrated). To my surprise, it actually worked! Seemless. I do question it working on forms based auth, but I encourage you to test it on your environments. I expect it should work on most environments.

Support forum for any questions can be found on SharePointForall.com. The team is anxious for your feedback :)

Note: This simple add-on is designed for both Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 for saving files to previous and current versions of WSS and SharePoint Server.

Love to hear your feedback!!!

NZ Community SharePoint Conference 09 Recap

Joel Oleson — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:40:26 GMT

Body:

Well done Chandima, Debbie Ireland, and Mark Orange. I am so pleased with the fantastic and up beat crowd here in Wellington. It’s very refreshing. The energy around SharePoint world wide is so up beat.

We opened up the conference with those 3 as MCs and doing the chand and mark show. Most conferences of this size are run by events companies. This one is run by SharePoint geeks, it’s a rich social experience.

Above, @chandimak, Mark Orange, Debbie Ireland – All SharePoint MVPs right before the keynote kickoff.

Michael Sampson handing me a signed copy of his new book “SharePoint Roadmap to Collaboration.” Check it out at http://www.sharepointroadmap.com. The book launched on day one of the conference.

I had a side meeting with Steve Smith around his end user adoption training materials/kit app. It’s really cool. He gave a preview to the crowd here. A sneak peak…

I had 3 presentations on day 1.

Keynote with a modified version of my 10 Steps to Successful SharePoint deployments with a Kiwi slant.
SharePoint Best Practices to Infrastructure Fundamentals and Information Architecture
Large Scale SQL SharePoint Deployments – a SharePoint SQL database focused session on scale and performance

At Day 2 I joined the Ask the Experts Panel. Good group of experts. From left to Right (Mark Orange (missing from photo), @SteveSmithCK @Chandimak, @joeloleson (me), @PaulCulmsee, and @pstork

They had a special treat a sea urchin called Kina. It smelled foul, very fishy, but I downed a big slice of the stuff. None of the other speakers joined me.

The exhibit hall is great. A few companies I hadn’t spend much time with yet. The surf board and smoothies booth is awesome. Haven’t seen that idea anywhere else. Lot of Good SharePoint partners to meet with. Quest is well represented, as is AvePoint, Mimosa, Intergen, K2, and more…

Everyone is having a great time. Tons of good content. Do a twitter search for #NZSPC and you can see what everyone is chatting about…

You can also find a stream of photos out on flickr on the conference.

What about the non conference stuff?

The Speaker dinner was great. Steaks, Fish, and an assortment. Last night a few of us went to the national museum Te Papa and saw a ton of whale and fish skelletons as well as a giant squid. We also went on a little ride and earthquake simulator. After that a few of us speakers ended the night at Macs.

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New Free Add-on For Saving Outlook Attachments to SharePoint – Quest DropThis for SharePoint

NZ Community SharePoint Conference 09 Recap