Messaging
Instant and Otherwise
Wednesday, December 05, 2001What are people really doing when they send an attachment? Has anyone accumulated statistics on what types of documents are most frequently attached to email messages?
Now that MIME is omnipresent, e-mail attachments are the simplest way to exchange files, of any kind. Attachments are the bane of the mail server. Unless the message store is smart enough, multiple copies are kept of the files, consuming space and bandwidth. Unless the administrator blocks large attachments, the users will send 55MB PowerPoint presentations to the entire sales staff. This is the case even with systems such as Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange that allow shared spaces. Why? Because there is no easier way to share files than to attach it to an e-mail.
Not only does e-mail provide an easy mechanism for distributing the file to a selected group of recipients, but the message body allows the user to provide context. FTP servers don't provide context, and are inaccessible or difficult to use. Web servers are not as inaccessible and allow the presentation of context, if you know HTML. But the problems with both FTP and Web are that 1) people don't know how to use URLs, and 2) how do I restrict access to just a few people?
A: Instant Messages