Create An Office Document Library in an Outlook 98/2000 Public Folder 

If you work with many documents or files, it can be difficult to pick out a few related files from a large list. For example, suppose you wanted to pick out all the files that were written by a salesperson relating to their accounts in the last month. You can use views to organize your Microsoft Office files and display exactly the information you want to see. And then you can use a Microsoft Outlook® public folder to share the files so that others can review them.

To use views, you must add properties to your Office files. On the File menu, click Properties, and then click the Summary tab. On it are several property fields, such as Subject, Category, and Keywords, that you can fill in to help you organize your files with views.

Then, send your files to an Exchange public folder. Once the files are there, anyone in your organization can use the document properties you assigned to them as columns in an Outlook view. Using views, users can arrange the files just the way they want to see them.

Why Use Public Folders and Views: an Example

Your sales team uses Microsoft Word documents to track accounts, and they use document properties to organize the files. Salespeople type their name in the Author property field, give the document a descriptive name in the Title field, and note the date of the latest account activity in the Comments field. In the Keywords field they type accounts, to identify these files as account status reports. They then send the files to a public folder named Accounts, so that anyone on the team can review them. Team members can use the document properties to sort through the hundreds of files to find those they want.

In the example shown above, the view was filtered to show one salesperson, the titles of documents for which she was the author, but only those documents that she had worked on in the last month. For more information about using views, see Using Views in Outlook 98 and 2000.

Set Up Your Own Office Document Library

Now that you've seen how your organization can use an Office document library, here's how to set up your own. There are three steps. First, decide how you want to organize your files. Then create the public folder. Third, send files to the public folder.

Decide How to Organize Your Files

The standard document properties for Office files include title, subject, author, category, keywords, and comments. You can use the text entered in one or more of those fields to create a filing system. For example, you might use a standard set of keywords for departments in your organization or a standard set of categories for documents that relates them to departments. In addition to these standard properties, you can also create your own custom document properties.

Create the Public Folder

You'll need public folder owner permission to create a folder and set options for it. You might need to contact your Exchange server administrator to get public folder owner permission. For more information about creating public folders, type public folder in the Office Assistant or on the Answer Wizard tab in the Help window, and then click Search.

Once you've created the public folder, you can set options for it. Right-click the folder, click Properties on the shortcut menu, and then click the Administration tab. One very useful option is the default view of the folder. By setting the default view you determine what document properties are always displayed as columns in the view. For example, you can create a view that uses the Author, Title, and Comments properties and then set this view as the default view. Everyone who uses the folder will see those columns when they open it.

Send Documents to the Folder

In any Office 2000 program, you can easily send a file to a public folder. On the File menu, point to Send To, and then click Exchange Folder. Then choose the folder you created.