File email into a project from Outlook

What the PadFlow pane in Outlook does, where the button hides, and how to add it yourself if your office has not deployed it.

The PadFlow add-in puts a small pane inside Outlook's reading pane. Open a message, open the pane, choose a project, and the message and the attachments you tick are filed into that project's document register without leaving your mail.

It reads the message you have open and nothing else. It cannot send, reply, delete, or change anything in your mailbox.

Where the button is

The add-in shows up on a message you are reading, never on one you are writing, and never on a calendar item.

On a wide window it sits in the row of actions at the top of the message. On a narrow window Outlook folds those actions away, and PadFlow goes with them: look under the ellipsis, the three dots at the end of the row. In newer builds that menu is called Apps. Nothing is wrong when it is not on the surface; it has been folded.

Signing in

The first time you open the pane it asks you to sign in. Sign in opens a small PadFlow window on top of Outlook. Sign in there as you normally would, and the pane picks the session up.

You need a PadFlow account for this, and you need email intake authority on at least one project. That is a grant somebody with project administration gives you; it is not one of the four access levels. Until you have it the pane says that no project will accept mail from you yet, and names what to ask for.

Filing a message

The pane is headed File to PadFlow.

1. Pick the project. The list holds only the projects you hold intake authority on, and PadFlow guesses one from the subject and the message.
2. Tick the attachments you want. Signatures, logos and small inline images arrive unticked, because they are almost never the document.
3. Press File.

The pane then says what happened: filed as correspondence when there was nothing to attach, or the number of attachments filed. If any could not be read it says how many need a manual look, and if the message carried dates it says how many were proposed for review.

Filing the same message twice

Nothing is duplicated. If a message has already been filed on that project the pane says so and stops.

The guard is the message's own identity, not its subject, so it holds across both ways in: a message somebody forwarded to a project address and the same message filed from the pane land as one document, not two.

Adding it yourself

If your office has deployed the add-in it is already there and you do nothing. If it has not, you can add it to your own Outlook.

It is file-based now. Microsoft has switched off Add from URL for custom add-ins in Outlook on the web and in the new Outlook, so a link to the manifest is no longer something Outlook will take. Download the file first, then hand Outlook the file.

1. Download the manifest. It is in the app, in the Library under Outlook add-in, and on your settings page. It saves as padflow-outlook-manifest.xml.
2. In Outlook, open Get Add-ins, then My add-ins, then Custom add-ins.
3. Choose Add from File and pick the file you just saved.

Microsoft keeps the current version of those steps at aka.ms/olksideload, and their wording moves faster than ours does.