Where I work records have traditionally been stored in manilla folders. These are documents from many, many years ago where much communication was done by fax, as well as hardcopies of emails and screen prints of FTP data transfers. (Where I worked 15 years ago we had a database called Goldmine to store all of this stuff!) Many folders are stuffed, and I don’t have enough room to store them. So I’ve been periodically purging unimportant stuff. I don’t really care that a file was sent to someone in 2006.
We’re finally going to start storing emails and screen prints electronically, and there is a folder set up to store these things on the shared drive. We’ll move stuff into it as we work on each member. I went to my Sent folder in Outlook 2010 to pull up emails concerning one member. I entered a search term. A notice came up that not all results were visible because Outlook was ‘indexing’. I have about 10,000 sent emails (we were told not to delete them, as the attachments are to be used for a project), and it took about half an hour for the ‘indexing’ to be done.
What is ‘indexing’? Why does it take so long? (Yeah, I know: Lots of emails. But it seems to take an extraordinary amount of time.)
Basically it’s making a tidy little database from which to search your email, instead of having to search the entire .pst file that physically contains all your mail.
Google indexes the Web in that its robots go out and hits web pages and pulls a percentage of the data available into its index. Then when you do a Web search, it searches its index - not the actual Internet.
It takes a lot of time because it’s making something other than a straight-up copy of your email. If that was useful (a copy) it wouldn’t have to index at all. It’s running queries on each email and extrapolating data. Probably parsing out keywords, phrases and word frequency. Then putting the data it extrapolates into the index table.
The good news is that once it’s done, it won’t need to be done on these 10,000 emails again.
A follow-on question: Is it possible to enter an address in an outgoing message to automatically write the email to the folder on the shared drive? Or do I have to copy it in once it’s sent?
What is the “shared drive” in your case? Do you just want a .msg file to be copied to a Windows file folder on a drive that is available over the network? There is no email address you can use to cause that to happen. A rule can be set up to copy a message to another folder within Outlook but for a file system folder you would have to write a macro to do it. I have written Outlook macros but I’m not sure how you would do this.
BTW the simplest view of indexing is that the process takes all the words out every email, and creates a list of those words (the index), with a pointer for each word back to the email that contains it. The index is kept sorted, and so can be searched for a particular word very fast compared to having to search through each individual email for the word. This is a somewhat simplistic view but explains your experience. It only takes a long time the first time you do it. From now on Outlook should keep it up to date as it goes along and you should rarely notice it.
Yes, I want to copy an email to a drive on the server and not into an Outlook folder. I’ve never written a macro, so that’s out. It’s not completely inconvenient copying an email into a folder, but it would be nice if software makers had thought of that. (i.e., in the address field put G:\Stuff\Andjunk and the file is saved there with the file name the same as the email subject.)
Microsoft put a lot of thought into using Outlook folders to manage mail, including user-defined rules, archive folders, etc. I think the whole concept is to make Outlook autonomous and *not *have to use external folders to manage mail.
You don’t say why you want to do this. If you are trying to offload bytes from your mail folders you can set up an archive folder or another personal folder that is located on the shared drive, and set up a rule to move or copy mail to it. But it will be stored in a .pst file and you will still have to use Outlook to view and manipulate what is in the folder.
Part of the documentation mentioned in the OP is emails. So we want to move all correspondence to a central electronic location instead of manilla folders or someone’s Outlook folder.
It’s no biggie. I can just copy the email and paste it into the folder. It would just be more convenient to be able to copy the email to the documentation folder.
Are you using Microsoft Exchange as your email server? If so, you can create shared folders that everyone accesses. A basic Outlook rule can copy an email to a public folder.
Heh. It took long enough for them to decide to store stuff electronically! And then, rather than make a folder within a common folder, they made it stand-alone. Also: While I may not know many of the ins and outs of Microsoft products, I can usually follow directions. It’s a little more difficult for my coworkers. I was hoping to have a shortcut (i.e., automatically writing an email to a non-Outlook folder) for myself. Maybe the others would do it if it’s not too hard. But to get them to switch to a shared Outlook folder at this stage isn’t going to fly.