Document Workflow in MOSS 2007: How to enable the portal to receive external emails

Here's a scenario:

A company, we'll call them "Some Company, Inc." wants you to build an external job web site, where people can find a list of all of the available jobs that Some Company, Inc. is trying to fill. 

However, Some Company, Inc. would like for those resumes sent via the jobs web site to show up in a document library within the HR Portal, so that recruiters can store/view/evaluate the resumes to find the most qualified applicants for a given job.

This is how I could accomplish this goal in MOSS 2007:

Firstly, I would enable the SharePoint Server to receive email.  This is done by configuring the portal's "Incoming e-mail settings" within the SharePoint Central Administration Operations page.  Keep in mind that the Central Administration Page is in a separate URL from the portal itself.

  1.  <- Select the Start Menu

  2.  <- Select Microsoft Office Server

  3.  <- Select SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration

  4.  <- Select the Operations Tab (at the top)

  5.  <- Click "Incoming e-mail settings"

  6. Once you are in the setting screen

<- Set "Enable sites on the server to receive email" to yes.

<- Set an email server display for the address.  This needs to match your email server for your network.  For example, if my Email address for my company is microsoft.com, then that's what I would put into this box.  In this example, I am going to set my address to moss.somecompany.com, because my test SMTP/POP3 server is set to moss.somecompany.com.

 

There are other settings in the "Configure Incoming E-Mail Settings screen" that you can enable if you want to.  For my example, I just want to enable my portal to receive incoming email, without any other considerations.

After enabling my server to receive incoming email, I can go to my portal (The HR Recruiting portal in this case) and enable my document library (called the Incoming Resume document library in my case) to receive email.

 

 <- First I went into the "Document Library Settings" tab, within the document library, for which I want to enable incoming email.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 <- Select the "Incoming email" link, which should be showing if you've configured Incoming email (above)

 

 

 

 

I then enable "Allow this document library to receive email" and then give it an email address to listen for.  In my case, jobs@moss.somecompany.com.  Then I can decide how I want to handle the attachments Resumes) with the email as well as other options. 

The only one that you have to enable, to receive external emails is the "Accept e-mail messages from any sender." 

Here's the resulting screen.

 

Hit the OK button and then send an email to the address that you told the document library to listen for and then you are done.

~ Robert Shelton