Drag & Drop from Outlook with O2S

Using the Office 2 SharePoint Outlook plug-in, employees of the STIHL Group can save their emails in SharePoint easily and conveniently – without losing any important information.

Complex intermediate steps are required to store mails in SharePoint 

Essential mail information such as sender, recipient, or date are not displayed as columns at first glance

Due to these hurdles, most mails were only stored in the personal Outlook ­mailboxes of the users

This leads to the possible loss of information in projects and high costs for data research, e.g. in the context of new topics or product liability cases

With the introduction of the Outlook plugin Office 2 SharePoint (O2S), it is ­possible to store mails and/or attachments conveniently in SharePoint via drag & drop

Metadata can be assigned directly in Outlook if required

O2S is basically self-explanatory and provides a fast and high acceptance 

In some application scenarios, there is no need to use a browser whatsoever

Thanks to drag & drop, faster filing processes with O2S significantly optimize collaboration within the company 

Since O2S was developed for usage in large companies, the administration and configuration are well thought out and easy

O2S has significantly increased the usability and user acceptance of SharePoint

The STIHL Group is using SharePoint 2013  worldwide for cooperation. One of STIHL’s ­requirements is to store mails in a shared repository. Following the replacement of Exchange ­Public Folders by Microsoft (completed at ­STIHL in 2014), this was no longer ­possible without ­difficulty. The integration of Outlook and SharePoint in the Windows 7 world is only moderately convenient: Mails must be saved manually before they can be uploaded to SharePoint and metadata can only be added in SharePoint.

Even with the introduction of ­Windows 10 and the Edge browser, the ­scenario has improved only marginally. Important information such as sender, recipient and date are not displayed in the SharePoint columns. Therefore, STIHL was looking for a simple and more convenient way to store mails in SharePoint with the respective project documents.

In a market investigation, the project team around Constanze Pretzler, consultant for document management and collaboration applications, became aware of the novaCapta plugin. “The Office 2 SharePoint plugin meets our application scenarios and offers STIHL the best price-performance ratio with the existing range of functions,” says Constanze Pretzler, summing up the ­decision. After an intensive evaluation of the functions of Office 2 SharePoint, O2S for short, STIHL decided to roll out the easy-to-use plugin at the Waiblingen site to all Outlook users and put it through its paces in a three-month pilot phase. Since June 2018, the parent company of the STIHL Group has been working with O2S, which currently has around 4,500 employees. By January 2019, approx. 1,200 additional employees at five further ­German-speaking locations have received O2S.

The optimistic approach put a damper on the team right at the start of the project: A frequently used add-in in the company was not compatible with O2S and caused problems for many users. 

“Thanks to the excellent cooperation with novaCapta’s support and product management, we were able to solve these problems quickly and efficiently,” reports Constanze Pretzler. “The acceptance of the new tool is nevertheless enormously good – there are many users who, in many cases, only work with O2S – in spite of the initial difficulties.”

The drag & drop functionality and the simple transfer of Outlook properties make O2S so popular with STIHL employees and ensure a high level of user acceptance. 
Constanze Pretzler praises the enclosed user documentation:  “O2S is STIHL’s first product to be rolled out to users with the standard novaCapta manual”. 
O2S also emphasizes the needs of administrators in a ­globally ­active Group. The configuration of O2S is very well ­documented and can be variably adapted. 

STIHL is taking giant steps towards the next milestone in the O2S project. In the next version of O2S, several STIHL-specific requirements will be implemented before it is rolled out to more than 10,000 users throughout the entire Group worldwide and installed as standard software on every computer.

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