SharePoint 2013 Site Mailboxes - Limitations

I am a fan of the new Site Mailboxes feature but there are some serious limitations. Apart from the fact a new license is used when creating a site mailbox, I found a whitepaper with a nice summary of the limitations:

No tagging of content with Metadata

1. No provision to capture email attributes from originating email when saving specific email attachments
2. No provision to capture email attributes when saving emails
3. No ability to tag content with custom metadata
4. No ability to select a library content type
5. No validation of metadata, files are saved checked-in
6. No ability to rename a file when saving to SharePoint
7. No support for versioning documents. If a document is saved to a location where a document of the same name exists, the save will fail and the user is notified accordingly via email.

Limited integration with File Explorer and other Office applications

1. No unified view of Site Mailbox locations from Microsoft Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) when saving and tagging with metadata
2. No unified view of Site Mailbox locations when saving files from File Explorer

Limited access to SharePoint capabilities when viewing content

1. No easy way to switch to a SharePoint view of the library content
2. No mechanism to View/Edit the selected items properties

Limited attachment and Link Management

1. No facility to replace attachments with links
2. No support for using document ID’s when inserting links
3. No ability to insert SharePoint/Site Mailbox content as attachments when sending to external recipients

Technology Restrictions

1. Only available when using the full 2013 server technology and associated prerequisites.
• SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
• Exchange 2013
2. Requires a Site Collection be configured to use HTTPS
3. Site Mailboxes are only available to the end users within Microsoft Outlook 2013
4. Hard limit of 10 Site Mailboxes within Microsoft Outlook.

Please click here to download the whitepaper.

Posted in: SharePoint 2013, SharePoint Online 2013