If attachments suck then Microsoft must...

[gulp]

So how long does it take you to open from and save to a Word document on your skydrive? And yes we're talking about desktop Word. How long does it take you to do the same when the document is stored locally? It's funny how in this woefully overly complicated diagram Microsoft put out ignores the fact that skydrive becomes an obstical. Especially when you're talking about documents you traditionally receive in desktop mail apps like Outlook. Oh but that's right we're talking about the "new" Microsoft where HTML5/JS are going to save the day... My bad.

I like the linked info graphic, but I still think that you're nucking futs. Word documents aren't like post-it notes, there would be vastly more content, (I would hope) and therefore would required much more attention.

So, it's not like you would receive hundreds of Word docs and open them only to close them five seconds later. More likely, you might open a couple of dozen over the couse of a year, and spend 15+ minutes reading / editing and plus 10 seconds opening each, asynchronously.

-Josh

But then again, stupid people do stupid things. For example, it makes me crazy when people put a print screen image, by itself, in an office document (word, excel, powerpnt), and send it as an attachment.

-Josh

@JoshRoss:Amen.

In my case, however, the screen shot is just a picture of the error dialog asking them to contact their system administrator and contains no context...

9 hours ago, DeathByVisualStudio wrote

[gulp]

So how long does it take you to open from and save to a Word document on your skydrive?

Not very. I regularly work directly off documents I have on Skydrive, so I'm not really sure what your point is.

@JoshRoss:

I did that because they want me to send an scanned transcript purely on word, no jpeg and no zip. that's not my fault.

Anyway, SkyDrive doesn't fix some of the problems it presented. For example, email got deleted before read. Could be the same to an email with skylink. Same with file version problem.

 The doc is stale need to be updated. Now, is the SkyDrive version you read before/after source changed it? sure the one I read is now, but, now is not always the final version. And it gets confusing as the record does not keep old versions for archiving and record keeping. You can say tons of bs inside and remove it to cover you track. not to mention I have heard the case when older version is the actual final one and they just pull the old one back as requested.

I am not saying SkyDrive is bad. It has its uses. what I am saying is attachments are not that terrible. 

According to this boring chart you can control who edits (and most likely who can delete) the document.

And LOL @ "nice try".

Does this fix the "I edited an attached document and saved it but now its gone because it was in a temp directory" problem? Or has that already been solved in some other way (we're still on Outlook 2003)

@DCMonkey:

You may not be able to edit it as a receiver as described above.

your boss can still mess it up after you send the link, if you give him the right to edit. which has happened to people I know. Always keep your own copy.

@DCMonkey:

You may not be able to edit it as a receiver as described above.

your boss can still mess it up after you send the link, if you give him the right to edit. which has happened to people I know. Always keep your own copy.

12 hours ago, DeathByVisualStudio wrote

[gulp]

So how long does it take you to open from and save to a Word document on your skydrive? And yes we're talking about desktop Word. How long does it take you to do the same when the document is stored locally? It's funny how in this woefully overly complicated diagram Microsoft put out ignores the fact that skydrive becomes an obstical. Especially when you're talking about documents you traditionally receive in desktop mail apps like Outlook. Oh but that's right we're talking about the "new" Microsoft where HTML5/JS are going to save the day... My bad.

well i thought from the subject this was about E-MAIL ??

if it is then Microsoft has very little control over that ....

now if it were up to me i would like to see several changes to SMTP, MIME, POP3 and all that.

but I do not think it will happen any time soon....

for a start: email "Messages" in an XML format with strict rules on what a valid message looks like in terms of the message headers.

that would help in a lot of places...

Sorry I should have been more clear.

Sender

1. Create a new word document with pictures and the like (you know like release notes or a user's guide).
2. Save it to your sky drive. (wait...wait...wait...) (Sign in to Live in neccessary)
3. Share it from you skydrive? I question this because is it always the case that the email account your skydrive it linked to is the one you want to "send the email" from? I suspect at that this stemp would also include getting the URL of the document and pasting into an email in your email client -- the latter being desktop Outlook for many. Getting the right URL to the document would be easy for us nerds, not so much for grandma or my boss.

Recipient

1. Open email.
2. Click on link to skydrive document.
3. Sign in to Live (setup an account if neccessary -- you know for those one or two people using gmail or their corporate email accounts).
4. The document opens in web Word but I want to use my rich desktop Word client so I click to open in Word, wait... wait... wait...
5. Edit the document.
6. Save back to skydrive, wait... wait... wait...

And sure "Hello World" documents are quick to load from and save to the skydrive but anything that's over a couple of megs and you're screwed -- saving to local disk is so much faster.

As for bandwidth you are using as much or more as any document downloaded to desktop Office apps has to be downloaded to the client as many times as the recipent chooses to open the document from the email.

It's in this light I find Microsoft's marketing disingenuous.

@DeathByVisualStudio: Ok, I think that I understand where you are going. BUT, there are so many things that suck about change tracking and collaboration, in regards to documents, that bandwidth lag should be the least of anyones problem.

You would be hard pressed to find desktop computer that wasn't always-connected to the internet. This crap should just work. If I have some word document, and I want to invite someone to collaborate with me on it, then I should just pass them some synchronization token and we should just see the words change on each of our screens as we type.

It's stupid to even get the web browser involved. I don't need to see skydrive, it should just exist to facilitate situations like what I wrote above. And that is what I would b itch about.

-Josh

15 hours ago, DeathByVisualStudio wrote

[gulp]

So how long does it take you to open from and save to a Word document on your skydrive?

40 to 50 times slower because the internet is 40 to 50 times slower (at a minimum) than a local LAN and thousands of times slower than local disk I/O.

1 hour ago, DeathByVisualStudio wrote

And sure "Hello World" documents are quick to load from and save to the skydrive but anything that's over a couple of megs and you're screwed -- saving to local disk is so much faster.

And yet it's still a fraction of the time it takes to re-write the document because they opened it directly from Hotmail/Gmail and when they clicked "Save" it just updated some temporary copy which gets deleted long before it can ever be found again.

I've lost count of the number of times I've had to explain (and then re-explain) to people that you have to save a copy somewhere else before editing a file sent via a webmail program. And that editing it, then clicking save, then replying to the mail doesn't send the updated copy of the document. This stuff works terribly at present and that's completely ignoring the fact that email attachments are a pretty damn shoddy way of transferring files at the best of times.

2 hours ago, DeathByVisualStudio wrote

 

It's in this light I find Microsoft's marketing disingenuous.

where does Microsoft recommend that process  ?

Why not just limit the attachment to, save to download folder first before it opens? Back then, windows doesn't have download folder, but since Vista, there is a typical download folder under the user profile. If they forgot, just go to download folder. Just disallow temp folder.

there are many ways to think about this. You can use SkyDrive on hotmail directly, which shall skip the file size limitation and reduce unnecessary download to the bits you dont read.

You can also think about hotmail allows editing word directly and receiver can save it right back to the same email.

you can do this locally on outlook as well.

But it is always important to think about presisting the versioning when you allow such thing. It is very important that the original is still there no matter who changes it, including your supervisor changing your content.

Versioning is a natural feature of attachment. I dont think it should be overlooked.   Cloud word is indeed the future, but, it is important to make sure it is a decent replacement , not introducing new problems.