Thursday 27 September 2007

Reply, but With or Without Attachments??

Mary Beth Raven has posted an interesting question over at her blog,

In Notes 8, (and previous versions) the default for "Reply" includes any attachment that might be in the message.
We are considering changing the default to "Reply without Attachment" for the Notes 8.0.1 maintenance release.


To me, previously Notes Admin, the answer is obvious, if users want to Reply with Attachment, they should have to work a little harder, we want to save disk space (Reply with Attachment is surely going to mean 3 copies, 1 from the original e-mail, 1 in the reply you send to Joe User and 1 stored in the copy of the reply you sent, after all how many users don't save their sent e-mail) and also reduce the bandwidth overhead.
However having experienced the backlash from users when we "tinkered" with the R6 template to make Send Without Attachment the default, it's something that at the end of the day comes down to communication with the users. They may be the bane of out life, but at the end of the day, if they are told what's happening they can't moan too much if they then forget and get something wrong. Personally this kind of option screams for a Preference setting in the Mail Template with an option for Admins to enforce via policy for one option or the other.
If they wanted to take this to another level, how about an option when you Save a copy of a Sent e-mail to save without attachments, whether it's a reply/forward or brand new e-mail. At the end of the day you have a copy of the file somewhere already, because you attached it to the e-mail or it's already in the e-mail you are replying/forwarding. Any thoughts on that as an option???

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I support the Reply default to be without attachments. We in fact had a managers meeting yesterday on this very point.