Send outlook 2007 email from within Sharepoint library

Question

I am trying to encourage users to use an appropriate sharepoint library as the home base for work on a project. New word docs, spreadsheets etc can all be created from the library with the menu opening the necessary app with the correct template and meta data to be entered. I cannot however get the same drop-down menu to trigger an outlook email. I had hoped that linking an outlook mail template would do the same as linking other office templates but it does not work. 

 

Any ideas as to how I can get this to work would be appreciated.

 

Thanks

 

John

 

 

Answer 1

John, what kind of email are you trying to generate? 

 

Is it an email as part of a workflow?  For instance: IF John creates a document AND Geoffrey's name is in the title, THEN send Geoffrey an email letting him know and include a link to the document in the email?

 

If this is the case, then you'll want to look into creating some basic workflows using SharePoint Designer.

 

If you're looking to be able to construct an email using SharePoint and have it sent from SharePoint, that's fairly easily done as well - but we'll need a little more information from you.

 

If you can tell us what the purpose is of the email you're sending, we can suggest something else.

Answer 2

Thanks Geofffrey.

We are introducing sharepoint progressively. We are a small group so at this point workflow is not a priority. I am not trying to generate the emails as parts of workflow. Rather it is the facility to, from within a library/list, trigger outlook to open a new mail window and associated metadata pane. Through the "new" menu in our project libraries we can create word docs, spreadsheets etc with the relevent templates attached. However so far I have been unable to discover a way to do the same for an outlook email. For now if I want to send (to an outside receipent or in house) an email, I need to go to outlook and create and sent the email and then import it to the sharepoint library. (we use Colligo so this is an OK approach), but I cannot see why we cannot save the step of moving from sharepoint to outlook and simply trigger a new eamil screen from the "new" menu/tab in the library. As I said I am hoping to make a sharepoint library the home screen from where as much as possible is done. I tried attaching an outlook mail template (*.oft) and linking this to the menu item. This works fine for word templates etc but with this one I get a message about needing a compatible office appplication. I suspect I am missing something quite simple but I have managed to find a way to get sharepoint to do pretty much everything I want but this one has me stumped.

 

Best regards

 

John