If Outlook has been sluggish and you’re a NetDocuments user, there’s a good chance one culprit is sitting quietly on your machine: folder mapping.
What is folder mapping?
In Microsoft Outlook, you have a variety of ways to save email into NetDocuments. The primary ones are ndSave and ndMail. But there’s a third option many people forget exists: folder mapping. It lets you right-click on a folder in Outlook and map it to a location in NetDocuments. From then on, any email you drag into that folder is automatically saved into NetDocuments.
It’s a clever feature — for the people who use it. In my experience, roughly 90% of users don’t.
The problem
Folder mapping runs as a separate component that hooks into Outlook, and it adds overhead whether you use it or not. If your Outlook is slow and you’re not dragging emails into mapped folders, folder mapping is doing nothing for you except taking up resources.
The fix
If you’re not using folder mapping, just remove it:
- Open the Control Panel and go to Add and Remove Programs (Apps & Features on newer versions of Windows).
- Find the NetDocuments Folder Mapping entry in the list.
- Select it and click Uninstall.
That’s it. ndSave and ndMail are unaffected — you can still save email to NetDocuments exactly as you do today.
Not sure if you use it?
Ask yourself: do you drag emails into Outlook folders that automatically file them into NetDocuments? If you have to think about it, you’re probably not using it. And if you remove it and later decide you want it, it can always be reinstalled.
If Outlook is still slow after removing folder mapping, there may be other add-ins worth reviewing — but this is one of the easiest wins for NetDocuments users.