How to Use Outlook to Send Email to a SharePoint Document Library on SBS 2008

[Today's post comes to us courtesy of Shawn Sullivan]

This post discusses the steps necessary to allow Outlook to send email to the SharePoint 3.0 Document Library (Companyweb). All mail enabled Sharepoint 3.0 document libraries in SBS 2008 are configured with a recipient address using the @companyweb namespace by default. The reason for this is to prevent potential conflicts with existing domain namespaces, thus resulting in the failure of mail delivery. The problem you may face is that if you try to send email to a recipient in this namespace, Outlook will launch a “Check Names” window, informing you that it does not recognize the recipient.

There are two ways you can work around this:

1. Use Outlook Web Access on the SBS 2008 server. OWA will accept @companyweb as a legitimate domain name.
2. Create a Mail Contact in Exchange 2007 for each Document Library in Sharepoint that you wish to route email to.

If following method 2, you will need to perform the following steps:

1. Create a Document Library in Sharepoint with an email address:
1. Browse to http://companyweb
2. Under Site Actions choose Create
   
3. Under Libraries choose Document Library
4. Enter a name for your Document Library, choose “yes” for Allow this document library to receive-email?, enter the email alias you wish to use under E-mail address:, and click “Create”
   
2. Create a Mail Contact in Exchange 2007 using the Exchange Management Console
1. Expand Recipient Configuration, Mail Contact. Under Actions choose New Mail Contact
2. Choose “New Contact” and click “Next”
   
3. Under Contact Information, accept the default Organizational Unit of SBSUsers. Enter the name, alias, and External e-mail address of the Document Library that you have created in step 1. For example, you have created a list with the email address of mylist@companyweb; you will enter mylist@companyweb as the external e-mail address of your Mail Contact
4. Click “New” under Configuration Summary to create the new Mail Contact.
   

The new Mail Contact will now be available in the Global Address List. Outlook will query the GAL when you enter in the e-mail address of your document library when composing a new message and find the contact.