Documentum and Alfresco – Cloud content attached to emails – Bulk uploading

While clients have multiple ways to ingest content attached to an email, more and more content is attached via links to cloud storage.  Whether these links are Google, Box or others, one problem is how to ingest the email and content into the ECM repository without having to manually download the documents and add each document individually, a tedious and time consuming activity.  This process can be even worse if instead of a link to a document, the email contains a link to a folder.  This post will discus how TSG has added the capability to add this content simply and easily, consistent with email with file attachments.

Dragging and Dropping Emails

HPI takes an intuitive approach, automating much of the process for the user. Anytime an email is added using the HPI “Add Document” action, the email is processed behind the scenes, with the body of the email getting checked for any known cloud link formats. Since emails can come with any number of different cloud services links (Google Drive, Oxygen Cloud, and One Drive to name a few), HPI stores a list of formats that it looks for when it finds a link, and, if the formats match, the cloud service’s APIs are used to automatically download the document. The user then gets to add both the email and all of the documents it contained as links, treating those documents as attachments.

Obviously, the biggest challenge in handling these emails is the sheer number of cloud services available to end users to store their files. Each service needs it’s own implementation since there is no standard, shared API that the cloud services use. Hopefully in the future, a more standard API will be adopted to allow for a more wide-reaching implementation in HPI.

Check out cloud link ingestion in the TSG Learning Zone or watch the video below.