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  • #2101223

    Breaking the Email attachment addiction

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    by timgray ·

    Email attachments, they break out exchange servers, jam up the network, and stress our lives. Corperate just handed down a notice that all email attachments over 500K in size will be stripped off the email before sending or recieving. So, the entire sales force is screaming, they want to email 30-40 meg Power point presentations, 5 meg excel spreadsheets, and 3 med word documents… It’s not that there’s that much content, they just like pictures and other useless pretty things. Myself? I think that the size cap is a blessing, and I want no attachments allowed… but my problem….

    How can I easily (as in easy for a brain-dead chimpanzee) make a system for the Salespeople here use a network share and email the link to the file? Whatis the easiest way to generate a link to a file to include in the text of an email?

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    • #3611818

      Breaking the Email attachment addiction

      by don christner ·

      In reply to Breaking the Email attachment addiction

      I like to use http://www.freedrive.com. I can upload files to it, give my customer a username and password and they can get to only the files that I allow. It’s free and does not use any of my drive space.

      Don

      • #3610386

        Breaking the Email attachment addiction

        by don christner ·

        In reply to Breaking the Email attachment addiction

        Freedrive is not dangerous. Only the people that you give the password to can reach the files and you can set up multiple areas with different passwords.

      • #3613779

        Breaking the Email attachment addiction

        by timgray ·

        In reply to Breaking the Email attachment addiction

        Corperate will have me fired within seconds of implimenting this. the solution must be secure and sitting on a computer in my building.

    • #3611811

      Breaking the Email attachment addiction

      by Anonymous ·

      In reply to Breaking the Email attachment addiction

      Regardless of Outlook version you want them to learn how to use hyperlinks.

      Outlook 2000 is easy, they create the e-mail text, right click a word that they want to link to a file, a menu will open, the menu has hyperlink as an option, select hyperlink and window opens that will let them specify the location of the file.

      If they are using earlier versions of Outlook try checking this site out;

      http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/links.htm

      Good Luck.

      • #3613780

        Breaking the Email attachment addiction

        by timgray ·

        In reply to Breaking the Email attachment addiction

        Great first part of the solution.. unfortunately my users will generate a hyperlink to a file that is sitting on their desktop and then come screaming because noone can access the file they emailed.. I support a sales staff, and they are by nature pretty darn stupid, and management demands I cater to their stupidity instead of making them actually learn how to use a correct proceedure.

    • #3611808

      Breaking the Email attachment addiction

      by andy1957 ·

      In reply to Breaking the Email attachment addiction

      Be careful of e-mail attachment limits as that makes communication inside a company more difficult (as we found out when we bought a subsidiary). Finance went ballistic as they couldn’t send out their 5 MB budget file as it failed at the subsidiary’s e-mail system!

      Instead why not set a limit on their part of the shared area so, if they want to keep these huge attachments, they have to put them in their personal folders? (Once they get over their Inbox limit, they can’t send any new e-mailuntil they have reduced their shared area mail.)

      That’s how we cured the problem while keeping the finance guys happy at the same time. After all, aren’t we here to keep the customers (internal as well as external) satisfied?

      • #3613781

        Breaking the Email attachment addiction

        by timgray ·

        In reply to Breaking the Email attachment addiction

        I wish I could, but the professionals at the corperate Email center decided to consolidate all our exchange servers and destroyed the email system (exchange doesnt scale well at all when you hit the 2 million user mark) so instead of fixing it, they tell everyone that no attachments are possible anymore.

    • #3609155

      Breaking the Email attachment addiction

      by flan ·

      In reply to Breaking the Email attachment addiction

      freedrive is dangerous unless you don’t mind another company has access to your files. just put up a POS internal ftp site and tell people to upload the files there. when they email just link it like ftp://internalserver/file.doc and that’s it

      • #3613782

        Breaking the Email attachment addiction

        by timgray ·

        In reply to Breaking the Email attachment addiction

        Internal FTP is fine, now how do you get a user that thinks AOL is complicated to use something as advanced as ftp? I have over 100 such users…. turning on the power is hard enough for them.

    • #3614355

      Breaking the Email attachment addiction

      by gabacious ·

      In reply to Breaking the Email attachment addiction

      Depending on the size of your organization, you might want to think beyond using e-mail as a mechanism for document sharing and consider implementing a 3rd party document management system. While the major players are DocsOpen and iManage, something like WorlDox or one of the other smaller DMS systems might meet your needs and be implementable without too much time and expense. Many of these now have web versions that you can configure for remote access as well.

      Hope this helps.

      • #3613783

        Breaking the Email attachment addiction

        by timgray ·

        In reply to Breaking the Email attachment addiction

        This is a great solution, if there is a version that allows about 100 regular users and the ability to have over 2 million casual users wihout costing more than a few hundred dollars. Everything I have looked at either fails miserably at security or scales badly, or is insanely priced.(I cannot spend $30K for software to fix the corperate email problem. I can only fix my departments problem but need the ability for all 2 million corperate users to be able to access a document in case it’s link was mailed to them.

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