How to Set up your SharePoint Library for eMail Metadata

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Join Soud Ereiqat, Colligo’s Digital Transformation Expert to learn How to Set up your SharePoint Library for email metadata.

Video Transcript:

Today I’d like to show you how to set up your SharePoint library for email metadata and what resources you can use for that. My name is Soud Ereiqat and I’m a digital transformation consultant for Colligo. I’ve been spending the last I’d say decade quite SharePoint centric, focusing on SharePoint technologies from the backend technologies all the way to front-end technologies. I’m focusing a lot on mobility these days and email management is one of the pillars of what I built my career but around so email is a resource and email are available left right and centre in each organization. They are still something that is growing as you can see here from a recent report that the emails worldwide and the email traffic worldwide has a four to five percent growth rate on a yearly basis and of course that puts enterprises in front of the challenge: how do they handle email where they put email and how do they store email. We can see here a slide from a recent study that approximately 8% of organizations that were asked in the study do put their email and SharePoint and there’s a big lack of email archiving email governance in organizations.

In this day and age I work with companies and teams on a daily basis to prepare them for a successful email archiving into SharePoint and today I’d like to share some considerations of these companies that I work with. So why do companies file email to SharePoint? The main reason really is compliance governance and meeting certain industry standards or industry compliance. Risk relations in general I find that email is filed to SharePoints in order to increase visibility and thus take the focus away from the users inbox and add the email into an area that is accessible to more than just one user. Decentralization at this point is very important because the moment that the email stays in my inbox no one else can access that email whereas if I put that email into a document management space like SharePoint that facilitates accessing that email later.

Findability of course is a very important aspect when it comes to filing email obviously. There’s a large amount of email out there and we want to be sure that we can find the email after we actually file them to somewhere. The defined ability aspect is very important when it comes to metadata as metadata actually enables and increases findability so email metadata extraction one important aspect to mention here is that not all solutions that allow you to move email. Let’s say outlook into SharePoint extract metadata so it’s quite important that you choose yourself a solution that does that has the capacity to go into the email item and extract metadata as mentioned the metadata later groups findability and the metadata also enables the use of views filters and content types so when I say huge let’s say you have an email archive that’s you’ve been archiving email in there for about a year’s time and if you have views that tap into the creation time of email then you can very neatly sort your email into emails that you received in q1 q2 q3 or a certain month and also filters are enabled when you have good metadata as you can filter for the right stuff that you’re looking for and content types.

I find quite useful when it comes to email as the metadata attributed to an email is something that you want to tie to an email content type rather than having those columns available in your library. Overall the topic of email metadata extraction is quite an important topic as every email contains over 20 fields that could be extracted and then written to your destination archive. In this case SharePoint for those metadata items after they’ve been extracted to be written to SharePoint obviously the destination columns must be available in SharePoint. Colligo does provide a template for you that’s available on our web site and our community pages that allows you to set up your library with the relevant columns especially if you’re planning to map to default column names as mentioned before it’s recommended to work with content types views and also one thing that I consider or that I recommend to our users is that they replace folders with document sets. Reason for that is that you can set default metadata to a document set and that takes us to the last point which is the defaults and SharePoint and most email management solutions can handle these defaults and if you set defaults to a certain document set then once you drag and drop an email to there you don’t have to set the metadata separately. Here are some resources for you to take a look at: obviously importing a document library template here is quite important and here’s the link to the template as I mentioned before the end results of what we want to put in place is something like this and so here you can see a SharePoint list I can see here the content type of legal email is selected and we have extracted the title of the email. We have some managed metadata that we want to add to the email in order to make it easier and findable and you can see here all those basic metadata or the basic metadata that was extracted from the email itself. It’s all there in SharePoint and obviously when I’m searching for something to do with the client City West Haven or something to do with the matter then I’ll find this email easily very well. Do feel free to reach out to us through the European SharePoint community but also reach out directly if you have any questions about this topic and I will be very happy to help you and take you through setting up your libraries for email metadata extraction and also enabling you to extract your metadata this point I’d like to thank you very much and wish you a very nice day!