I frequently get the question in courses: “Is it possible to send a document stored in a document library via e-mail”? Of course, there is the Send To menu, where you have the option “Email a link”, but what if you want to send the document as attachment?

Even if this is against the philosophy of SharePoint as the collaboration platform (you should give them access to the site, not send attachments), we do not want to give access to all our customers.

Echo Technology (http://www.echotechnology.com) recently released the Outlook PowerTool 2007, that adds a functionality to the document libraries of SharePoint, allowing you to send links to multiple documents, or to send documents as attachment in an easy way.

One of the drawbacks seems to be that it modifies the standard “document library” feature (I wonder if this is supported). But at least it demonstrates that it is a possible development. It would have been better to add a new document library template where the feature is activated. And another one: the installation instructions specify Ensure that the internet zone has the setting “Initialize and script Active X controls not marked as safe” set to Enable”

Once all this is done, it really works nice:

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