Keeping track of emails with SharePoint - Document Management News

Ballard Chalmers have developed a seamless solution in conjunction with a Private Equity investment administration company which administrates over 3000 PE funds in Europe.

Keeping track of the emails and associated attachments sent between the private equity investment administration company and all the involved external parties including as the investors, fund companies and investment advisors is a real problem that we were faced with solving:

Any emails sent directly from the main administration system are relatively easy to deal with: A copy of each email and its attachments are stored in a SharePoint document library appropriately tagged with the date sent, the target email, the investment, fund, sponsor, investor and other pertinent information.

As well as emails all the reports produced by the system and all the documents stored through the system are also stored in SharePoint and tagged with the required attributes.

The tags allow the administration system to locate any information it wants by directly searching for it in SharePoint. For example, while displaying the screen for an investor the system can locate and display all the emails send to the investor, and reports produced for the investor and all the documents stored.

So far so good; but what about when someone replies to or forwards an email? This needed to be covered as well or important information may be lost. Clearly there is no guarantee that any external users, such as investors, will be using the same email server as the administration company and equally they may not even be using Outlook as an email client and so very few assumptions can be made on that front. We also did not want to add any code/links to the emails that would call back to the server as this would violate confidentiality and may cause the email to be marked as spam (and in any case there would be no guarantee that it would actually work).

So in order to keep track of the emails we inject a small unique ID into the subject line of the email (or into the body of the email for HTML emails). This unique ID is recorded in the database where it is associated with original email in SharePoint. If anyone replies to an email then code added to the Microsoft Exchange email server reads the unique id and associates the reply with the same tags as the original email and stores the reply in SharePoint. If someone forwards the email the same applies as long as the email is ultimately sent back to the administration company. Obviously if someone tampers with the unique id in the mail then contact is lost, however they are unlikely to do this. Emails that are never sent back are not tracked but this is not an issue because the system is keeping track of data sent from and to the company and so these emails are not of interest anyway.

So there we have it. The benefit of using emails to send documents to and from external users is maintained without the disadvantages of losing track of the data. The administration system knows exactly what was sent to whom regarding what. All this using standard integration technologies built into Microsoft SharePoint server and Microsoft Exchange server with a little help from .NET and SQL Server.

To find out more about SharePoint and email admin, or other services on the Microsoft Application Platform (.NET, SQL, SharePoint, BizTalk) from Ballard Chalmers, please email us or please call Andrew Chalmers on 01342 410223.

Sign up to receive our regular email newsletter

Return to News