Hi Jeff,

Thank you for your question.

Please find the answer below:

Our decision to not show the entire SharePoint Site/Library/Folder structure on the left navigation of Outlook is based on the following:

1. Performance impact on Outlook e.g. if a library (or one or more libraries combined) has 2000 folders we would need to add them to Outlook and the performance impact on Outlook would be considerable. Therefore, slowing Microsoft Outlook start-up and the overall user experience/performance in Outlook. The interaction required to maintain the SharePoint Structure, security level permissions and configuration options in SharePoint for the different locations defined via folders in Microsoft Exchange/Cached Mode Outlook is not desirable.

2. Useability – trying to drag and drop to an extensive folder hierarchy in Outlook is hard and almost unusable if it is contains a deep nested folder structure.

3. User Adoption/Noise – In many instances a user is only interested in a small subset of the overall locations (Libraries, lists, folders, document sets) available within a SharePoint environment. Presenting the full SharePoint hierarchy in a user’s personal information management environment (Outlook) will detract from the users experience when interacting with SharePoint.

Our approach – Favourite and Recent locations

Rather than present the full SharePoint hierarch on the left navigation, we are allowing the user to create a category structure on the left navigation of Outlook (it is not the intention for a business/user to recreate a SharePoint structure) if required and set 1 or more favourite SharePoint locations under this structure. These favourite locations can be either a SharePoint Site or one of the final destinations: Library, List, Folder or Document Set. In some cases it makes sense to add a whole Site or Library to the left navigation of Outlook and when you drag/drop content to this location, the ‘Save to SharePoint’ will display any lower level SharePoint structures (e.g. folders within a library). The display of the folder structure is all performance tuned to only bring back the relevant part of the folder structure in an asynchronous manner when the user requests to expand this the folders.

Recent Locations: OnePlaceMail also provides Recent Locations on the left navigation of Outlook and on the Copy To/Move To button in Outlook. Therefore, providing an easy mechanism to both save content and access content from a location in SharePoint. Recent locations can be made as favourite locations if desired.

Hope this will help.