This post is a follow-up to my earlier whitepaper on “E-mail Records Management in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007” (available for download from the Mindsharp Premium content Web site - https://www.mindsharp.com/Default.aspx?page=Login&destPage=Default), to further explain the e-mail formats which can be sent from the Exchange 2007 (SP1) Journaling feature. If you’ve already read my paper or worked with Exchange 2007 then you’ll be familiar with the two types of formats in which e-mails can be sent via the Journaling feature - Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format (TNEF) or Outlook Message Format (*.msg). The Exchange administrator can choose which format will apply to any e-mails sent via the Journaling feature, for instance make *.msg the default format for any e-mails sent via Journaling or e-mail format for specific/individual Journals. My preference, in terms of SharePoint integration, is for the *.msg format and I outline my reasoning below.
Note: Here I talk about the journaling feature in direct relation to sending e-mails and attachments to the SharePoint (MOSS) Records Repository.
My first consideration is in the ability to be able to open e-mails and attachments once they are actually stored within a SharePoint document library. In my paper, I talk about the ability to more easily read/recover e-mails (including attachments) sent to the records repository in the *.msg format. For example, you could access those e-mails within the Records Repository document library/ies and open them, and access original contents, directly in Outlook. Whereas, e-mails sent using the TNEF format and received by SharePoint are converted into an MHT file and can’t be directly opened using Outlook. Instead original e-mail contents are encrypted, including any attachments which were included in the original e-mail. The MHT files can be opened using something like WordPad and you’ll see that the header section of the file identifies the Content-Type of application/ms-tnef and name=”winmail.dat”. Any attachments sent in the original e-mail appear to also be included as part of the encryption, identified in the header as “X-MS-Has-Attach: yes”.
Let’s explain TNEF a little further. Basically, if the e-mail recipient doesn’t understand TNEF format then the e-mail will arrive as a winmail.dat attachment. This is similar to what is happening when SharePoint receives a TNEF (encoded) e-mail. Except, in the case of SharePoint, the e-mail is saved as an MHT type format, or *.mht. The following URL’s explain the process a little further:-
My second consideration is in being able to index and search e-mails, and their content, within SharePoint. TNEF files, given their encrypted state, are unlikely to be indexed. The following article also suggests this as being the case.
Out-of-the-box, SharePoint isn’t able to index *.msg files (by index, I mean look inside those files). Instead, you can install a 3rd party iFilter to have *.msg files successfully indexed and included within search results. The iFilter Shop has recently released an upgrade to their *.msg iFilter which is compatible with MOSS and WSSv3:- http://www.ifiltershop.com/msgfilter.html.
So, I hope the above considerations help you in planning and implementing your SharePoint records management strategy. Remember too that accessibility discussed in this post is also dependent upon the permissions to the records repository (also discussed in my whitepaper).