Well, it’s about time. It looks like SharePoint and Exchange are finally integrated in the ways users have been wanting for years now– tasks, document sharing and e-Discovery.
Some of the most common questions I’ve fielded over the last few years, both as a consultant and a SharePoint specialist at Microsoft, have concerned getting these two applications to work together. Business users inevitably would ask me why they couldn’t just drag a document from an email into a SharePoint library and maintain context, or see all of their tasks (from both Outlook and SharePoint) in the same array.
During Richard Riley’s annual demo at SharePoint Conference 2012 today, we got the chance to see that yes, now you can do those things– and one more big win as well. E-Discovery is now available as one single application, based in SharePoint.
From a single control panel in SharePoint, we got to see how a user can define an e-Discovery query and set it up to span not only SharePoint, but also Exchange (and even Lync conversations and fileshares). This is the sort of unified user experience and integrated functionality that people in the ECM and legal professions have been yearning for, for years.
Well, it’s here now, and we saw it live. Score one more for SharePoint.
