I support a group of management consultants. They regularly circulate big attachments to each other. They all have Quickr set up. They all started with the preferences option for "When sending e-mail with attachments" set to "Prompt me" as to whether to save the attachment to Quickr and send a link. But they never do it!
As an older techie it pains me to think about all those copies of large attachments filling up hard disks and downloading across multiple links of questionable speed and reliability. But it's all magic to the user community. They don't see any benefit and it is another few clicks when sending. It should be no extra effort to the recipient providing Quickr Connectors are installed; it may even save a click or two as compared to opening an attachment.
So, can technology fix the issue? Is it possible to force "Always send links" when all recipients are internal (and therefore have guaranteed access to a Quickr place and the Quickr Connectors)?
The phone lines are open...
David N Schaffer January 5th, 2010 12:40:46 PM
It may be that they have discovered some of the brick walls in Quickr. I'm sure the specifics are due to both how it has been implemented and the limited knowledge and time to perfect it we've had here at this site - but that aside, it doesn't take long in Quickr to run into limitations, strange behavior, attachments that are "attached" but not able to be loaded...
I am hypothesizing and extrapolating onto your situation, but precisely because it is expected to be magic to them, the faintest bit of difficulty will turn them off to it.
If you want to consolidate your domino file storage, I suggest looking into DAOS... it sounds very promising and should provide the centralization you're looking for. It's anyone's guess if, like the DB2 nsf connector, it will stick around or go away in a future release. From what I've read so far, it should be as """simple""" as setting it up on your 8.5 server and pointing it at your storage.
set it by default but unless you push the change down at every login or lock down their settings, they will find out how to reset that and not use it.
DAOS saves you on the back end though.
You can use technology to implement "forced" rules, but people will naturally take the path that yields the results they need in the easiest manner. You can get people to use Quickr (or any other centralized repository) by providing them with a benefit they otherwise could not get. Saving storage doesn't really affect them personally much--providing version control can be a much more effective reason. Providing the context and reasons that make sense to the users for the information being stored in a centralized place will get people to be open to accepting the change. It becomes the easiest manner if it provides a benefit to them they can see and find value in.
I agree with Daniel. The only way to change behavior is to exact a cost or provide a benefit. In this case, perhaps you could enforce more strict mail quotas which would encourage people to be more judicious in sending huge files to others.
When your boss screams at you for sending a 14MB powerpoint file that blows his quota, then the cost becomes clear.
We do use DAOS. The back-end concerns are less with saving disk space on the server than with minimizing database sizes and bandwidth used by local replicas on the consultants' laptops.
We're also trying to get everyone to use Quickr for document management. To the extent that we can capture documents into Quickr up front we minimize document management issues.
The issue seems to be that, for most users, the benefits of using Quickr accrue to the entire organization but the effort (minimal to my way of thinking) falls on the individual who is tasked with helping his client or selling projects, not with document management. There are, of course, benefits to the individual user -- protection against potential data loss when "My Documents" is used instead of Quickr, searchability, documents are available to support staff or colleagues without having to e-mail them, faster replication, etc. But they're not intuitive or compelling to most non-technical users.
It seems then you have the beginnings of a proper Policy in terms of business rules and goals. It may be, for all the reasons noted, and as Kieth suggested, the best way to achieve it is with the proper policy - set it by default. If it's too much load on them to think about document management, no problem - take the decision away and make it the defacto option.
What would be really nice is if there was some intelligence in the mail client to have a threshold for this, so only the large files default to being moved to Quickr and every day email attachments do not.
Yes. A larger issue than attachment size is recipient. Many (most?) attachments are being sent outside the organization and in most cases we want those sent with the e-mail since the recipient would not have access to our internal Quickr places. Unless there is some way to set the policy to apply to only internal recipients it's not an option in this organization.
What if the recipients are both internal and external? You may be fighting a battle that is not worth fighting.