Quest software in the continued spirit of community awareness has launched it’s newest addition.  It’s a client Outlook add-on that makes it super easy to save attachments to SharePoint and instead send links to SharePoint.

This simple screenshot spells it out quite clearly…

The Drop down for the target SharePoint folder can be pre-configured to default to selected to common save locations… including saving up to the last 15 used save locations!

• The first option to send only the link – Intranets or for Internet accessible environments
• The second to add to SharePoint and include attachment – commonly used when you’re including external people, but you want to have the document on SharePoint for updates and edits.
• The third option is the same as default outlook behavior.  Simply sending the attachment.

What I like about this nifty little tool is… it’s simple innovation on something I’ve been looking to see innovated since the STS days.  Saving to a URL is difficult in the default “save as” dialogue.  It isn’t intuative to save to a sharepoint document library.  That’s a common training hurdle to overcome and get people in the habbit of doing.  The attachment scenario is really hitting at the heart of the file sharing scenario.  I think it’s great to see this as a freeware solution.  Sure people will come up with clever enhancements.  Colligo for example has a great email add-on that allows you to save meta data while saving emails. 

The download is a small zip 1.8MB which includes a setup executable that can easily be installed on an XP, Vista, or Windows 7 desktop (requires admin rights to setup). (May require updated .NET framework)

Installation and Configuration options are explained in this easy to follow article called the DropThis mini guide. (Also includes uninstall steps if necessary.)

You can download the Free Quest DropThis for SharePoint 1.0 (a client Outlook add-in) at SharePointForAll.com and click on “Download” on the top right.

Here’s my experience:

1. I downloaded the zip file, made sure outlook was closed, double clicked the zip, ran setup, re-opened outlook, noticed it said loading add-ins

2. Opened up the DropThis mini guide to find out how to configure it.  In Outlook “Tools, Options, Quest DropThis for SharePoint” tab put in my SharePoint doc lib, and went with the defaults.

3.  Opened up an email, clicked attach (expected to see dialog box) I figured out it’s after you click send (reading the mini guide again :))  Chose to send link only.

4.  Clicked send.

5. Looked at the email in my sent items:

Quest DropThis has uploaded the following attachments into SharePoint:
Notes.txt (link was actually hot) it didn’t throw an ugly URL in.

I thought it was going to choke on configuring it to my internet blog shared documents which does prompt for auth (not integrated).  To my surprise, it actually worked!  Seemless.  I do question it working on forms based auth, but I encourage you to test it on your environments.  I expect it should work on most environments.

Support forum for any questions can be found on SharePointForall.com.  The team is anxious for your feedback :)

Note: This simple add-on is designed for both Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 for saving files to previous and current versions of WSS and SharePoint Server.

Love to hear your feedback!!!