How can I share mail with my team?

November 9, 2009 10:24 AM

The team I'm working with is using Outlook 2007 and Exchange 2007. It seems like if there's a Project X we're all working on, there'd be an easy way to tag and share all e-mail related to the project. We thought of deploying Managed Folders, but it appears that you can only view your own managed folder. There must be a way of achieving this kind of functionality?

We figured out how to deploy a managed folder selector so that we can choose what projects we want to be on. Hey this worked great, but we probably should have deployed a test managed folder first as we quickly learned that you can't view what people put into their managed folders.

It appears that the Microsoft recommended way is setting up a Sharepoint site and saving the e-mail to lists. These lists can then be attached in Outlook 2007 as a mailbox store, so you have the functionality to drag and drop mail messages within Outlook. This seems less than ideal because now there's an Exchange AND Sharepoint box to manage mail messages. No one is jumping at the chance to do this.

We were toying with creating a mailbox store for the individual projects and everyone on a particular project given access to this. The added functionality being that people could CC the [e-mail] and it'd automatically get copied to the store.

In any case, I don't want to be reinventing the wheel here. Surely someone else must be doing this, there must be a clever way of going about this?

posted by geoff. to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Maybe this is not a common problem.
posted by geoff. at 12:20 PM on November 9

WSS is free, so it's go that going for it, but I don't think there is any simple way to get it to behave exactly as you'd like.

I'm not sure what you mean by "managing 2 boxes". "E-mail enabling" a document library allows SharePoint list to store messages and attachments at a specified e-mail address. This can be done using SMTP so no exchange mailboxes are created.

Attaching a document library to Outlook allows you to browse and open a list's contents. However, you won't be able to drag & drop messages from your inbox to the library.

If you configure an e-mail enabled library, your team will need to include the library on all messages sent, which is a little painful.

I'm sorry I couldn't be more helpful, good luck.
posted by askmehow at 12:32 PM on November 9

Have you looked into MS Project?
posted by X4ster at 12:39 PM on November 9

Yeah I think Project is a bit too much, we just wish to share mail messages. The project isn't structured enough for any formal project management software.

If you configure an e-mail enabled library, your team will need to include the library on all messages sent, which is a little painful.

This is what I'm worried about, I'm also concerned that there is no native multiple message threading ... so it could get really messy, even with some complex filters.

I just thought there had to be an Exchange native way of doing this, thereby keeping us from duplicating our data.

The problem it seems, is that Exchange groups everything based on AD objects. So even with EWS I would have to iterate over each mailbox, there appears noway to create a view or index like you would in a typical SQL database.

I think a simple solution I'm going to go with is have each person create a folder they want to share and then add everyone's accounts in Outlook. You end up having a lot of "Mailbox - Person's Name" stacked up everywhere, but it is not as bad as it seems.

I might take a look at Zimbra, I'm not wed to Exchange.
posted by geoff. at 1:15 PM on November 9

Oh and thanks, any other suggestions are welcomed. I'll be monitoring this.
posted by geoff. at 1:15 PM on November 9

Call me crazy, but why not set up a list-serv for every project, and subscribe people to the relevant projects?
posted by pwnguin at 3:21 PM on November 9

Public Folders? They didn't remove them in 2007 despite wanting to.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/03/31/448537.aspx

(sorry if managed folders is the same thing)
posted by mattdini at 3:37 PM on November 9

I'd do this with public folders. The folder itself could have an email address, so mail could be sent to it directly, and the users in the project could have permissions to copy their mail into the folder, or subfolders or whatever. Let me know if you have any questions about best practices on this.
Sharing user folders causes more I/O load on the server than you'll want, especially if the users have high item counts.
posted by 8dot3 at 7:50 AM on November 11