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CONFIDENCE, BY DESIGN
While emails could be saved into SharePoint, the experience was limited. Emails appeared as standalone files with little visible context, and attachments remained locked inside the email. To understand what an email contained, staff had to open each one individually. Attachments could not be searched or filtered independently, making it difficult to quickly locate the right information when it was needed.
This created friction for teams who needed to work efficiently across projects and reliably retrieve information, particularly where complete records were required. It slowed people down and created uncertainty in daily work.
By combining SharePoint metadata with thoughtfully designed views, Information Leadership transformed how NZFC stores and accesses email within SharePoint sites. Information that was previously difficult to find is now surfaced in a way that aligns with how teams actually work – enabling easier navigation, clearer visibility, and more confident information retrieval across the organisation.
Emails are dragged directly from Outlook into SharePoint libraries. SharePoint then extracts key email metadata – such as sender, recipient, subject, and sent or received date – and applies it consistently within purpose-built views.
Most importantly, attachments are separated from the email itself and displayed as individual items nested beneath their parent email. These attachments inherit metadata, allowing them to be filtered, grouped, and located independently while still maintaining their relationship to the original email.
Custom views were created specifically for email management, alongside existing document and folder views, ensuring consistency across SharePoint sites while keeping email-related metadata confined to where it is relevant.
This turns messy inbox content into clear, sortable views that help teams find what they need quickly and work with certainty.
A calm, predictable rollout saw NZFC test the solution across multiple environments, with small refinements made as needed. The approach gave the team confidence at every step and showed that even complex ideas can be made simple and achievable with the right structure.
Within a SharePoint sites, staff can switch to dedicated email views that present information in a familiar, spreadsheet-like format. Emails can be grouped by subject, filtered by sender, or sorted by date, making it easy to scan and narrow down large volumes of correspondence.
Attachments appear directly beneath their related email, clearly showing which files belong to which conversation. Users no longer need to open emails just to check whether attachments exist or what they contain.
Because these views behave like Excel-style lists, teams can quickly apply filters and groupings to answer common questions – such as finding all emails from a specific person or all correspondence related to a particular subject – without navigating folders or opening multiple files.
Staff can find and organise emails much faster, and the ability to group emails and attachments together is making everyday tasks easier and more efficient. The solution is also expected to reduce compliance and operational risks over time, as metadata and automation ensure consistent, reliable records management.
NZFC sees strong potential for wider use across teams and projects, and expects the solution to be popular with other organisations that rely heavily on email.