Of Chickens and Eggs

While working with a client yesterday we were discussing the idea of having email (or parts of your email) as a window in SharePoint.  They were discussing how the limited space made things difficult while simultaneously discussing how it was important to have a one stop experience for the portal.  Then the comment came up that one member of the group always started their day with email.

A light bulb went off.  You can set an HTML (web) page as the default view for a folder in outlook.  Simply right click the folder, select properties, select the Home Page tab, enter your URL, Click the ‘Show home page by default for this folder’ checkbox and click OK.  Now whenever you click on the folder the web page appears.

Now they can decide whether they want Outlook housing SharePoint or SharePoint housing email via Outlook Web Access.  While on that note.  Send me an email if you’ld like to beta some utilities that are like the ‘My Inbox’, ‘My Calendar’, and ‘My Tasks’ web parts in SPS.  I have written a set which don’t require the user name to be set in properties so they can be deployed on a shared view.  I’d like to get some testing done on them.