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.
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