Saving email’s in SharePoint from Outlook 2007
Wouldn’t it be nice if all business e-mail automatically got archived in your on-line document storage? Filing ever e= -mail with the proper client and accessible for the entire organisation while al= so applying proper security trimming so that only the people that should have access actually get it. Wouldn’t it be even nicer if the development effort required was minimal?
Office 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and VSTO= 2005 SE make this a possibility. The objectives of this paper are to get you started, point you to right resources and provide some sample code so you = can jump-start this project and deploy in weeks, not months.
As you can tell by this introduction there are a few pre-requisites that need to be considered, its not that it isn’t pos= sible to do these kinds of things in previous versions of Office and SharePoint = but Office System 2007 has improved the development environment so much that w= ould be stupid to ignore these capabilities.
You will need Visual Studio 2005 with Visual Studio T= ools for Office 2005-SE, a version of Microsoft Office 2007 and a server running Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.
Send Item events.
Its pretty easy to create an Outlook Add-in in VSTO a= nd add an event-handler, the though part is deciding which event is the most appropriate for what you need to do. For activities that need to be execut= ed when mail is send out hooking up to the AddItem event in the Send Items fo= lder is probably the one to go for.
In Visual Studio create a new project and pick the Ou= tlook Add-in template in the Office-2007 Add-in folder (Figure 1). This will gen= erate a working Add-in setup all the globals etc. you need and Visual Studio will even create a setup project for you.
![](3D"file:///C:/4F393234/eMailOutlookandSharePoint_files/image002.jpg")
Figure 1, a default Outlook 2007 Add-in
A class named ThisAddin is created for you, all you n= eed to setup is the hook to the Event handler:
public
{
private Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Items items;
{
=
;
Outlook.MAPIFolder send =3D
=
;
items =3D send.Items;
=
;
items.ItemAdd +=3D new Outlook.
}
…….
Two things are worth noticing in this code, first of = all notice that there already is an existing Outlook application object that c= an be referenced using this.Application and secondly we need to store a referenc= e to the Items collection as an instance level variable. If you do not do that = and for example use a private in the method or not even a variable at all like this:
send.Items.ItemAdd +=3D=
new Outlook.Item=
sEvents_ItemAddEventHandler(ItemSendMonitor);
the items collection (or in this case the object called “send”=
)
will be destroyed by the garbage collector and your event-handler with it,=
you
events will never fire.
The ItemSendMonotor event handler code for testing th= is behaviour looks like this:
private
{
=
;
if (Item is
Outlook.MailItem)
=
;
{
MessageBo=
x.Sho=
w(" Item Send " + (Item as Outlook.MailI=
tem).Subject);
=
;
}
}
Simple save of Mail item into SharePoint
Now we can access the Mail Item and save it to ShareP= oint. Luckily the Outlook MailItem class already knows how to Save itself, it ha= s a Save method. All we need to provide is the location and the name we’d like to use.
![](3D"file:///C:/4F393234/eMailOutlookandSharePoint_files/image004.jpg")
Figure 2, Settings for saving Items
In the sample project (Step2) I have added a Settings= Item (see MSDN) and use that to configure the target server and document librar= y. The name of the Item is build from the subject and I’ve added the En= tryID to make the name unique (we can’t have duplicate filenames, not even= ing SharePoint).
string cSi=
te =3D global::SendItemsLogger.Settings.Default.Site;
string cLi=
b =3D global::SendItemsLogger.Settings.Default.Lib;
string Ent=
ryName;
Outlook.MailItem _Item =3D (Outlook.MailItem)Item;
EntryName =3D _Item.Sub=
ject+" - "+_Item.EntryID;
_Item.SaveAs(cSite + cLib + "/" + EntryName + ".msg", Type.Missing);
To be continued….
List of internet resources used for research:
Collecting Outlook 2007 Statistics Using VSTO 2005 SE= by Kevin Marshall
http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2006/11/20/1= 111248.aspx
Source code for Step 1:
http://www.softwareobjectives.com.au/VoConversion/Res= ources/SendItemsLogger-Step1.zip
Source code for Step 2:
http://www.softwareobjectives.com.au/VoConversion/Res= ources/SendItemsLogger-Step2.zip