We’ve talked about our approach to connecting the file cloud, app cloud and device cloud. A key part of the work we are doing in the app cloud is to bring the benefits of cloud-based file sharing to email apps.
In this post, Lia Yu, a product marketer on the SkyDrive team, describes the problems people have with traditional email attachments and how the cloud can solve them. We’ve also included a few tips for how SkyDrive can help at work – where we’re often inundated with attachments. (SkyDrive may be particularly helpful if your workplace hasn’t made the switch yet from outdated to modern tools.)
We hope you find these tips helpful – and look out for more updates soon.
- Anand Babu, Group Product Marketer, SkyDrive
The attachment problem
Every day, the average office worker receives over 170 email messages a day, and sends over 35. With that kind of volume, it’s understandable that over half of the average work day consists of dealing with email. That’s over 1000 hours a year. It’s worth taking a look at where people can save some time on the process.Dealing with email attachments is a big contributor to the amount of time spent on email. In Hotmail alone, there are over 1 billion email messages sent with file attachments per week. While attachments can be useful, in many situations, they aren’t the right tool for the job.
To see how much time an attachment can waste during its life, click here to see our infographic.
Here are some examples of when attachments are frequently a waste of time:
1. Working together on a document
If you use email to work with others on a doc, everyone has their own edited version saved locally on a computer that they then have to send as an email attachment to the group. With so many doc versions being sent back and forth, docs can get lost and a lot of extra work is created. If people edit simultaneously, someone will have to go through multiple versions and try to merge edits into one doc. It’s colossally inefficient and potentially migraine inducing.
Photo courtesy of The Oatmeal www.theoatmeal.com © 2012 Matthew Inman
2. Sharing and publishing files
If you need to share files with a large audience, using email often means sending files over and over again—either because you need to update the files after you send them, or because the people you sent the files to lost your attachment in the chaos of their inbox.3. Sending large files
Most of us have had the problem where we tried to send files that got bounced back because their file size was too big, or because your recipient’s inbox couldn’t handle a massive file you just sent. Even if you zip or break apart your attachments, that takes a lot of extra time-wasting steps to send those files.
Photo courtesy of The Oatmeal. www.theoatmeal.com © 2012 Matthew Inman
4. Making notes and files available anywhere, anytime, across devices
Accessing your important files anywhere should not require you to send an email to yourself. Even though we all do it, that method is pretty primitive. You usually end up having to search for the email buried somewhere in your inbox or sending it again later.The attachment solution
Today’s cloud services offer a great alternative to attachments that solve many of these problems. Instead of emailing docs back and forth for group editing, SkyDrive lets you edit the doc in one place using Office Web Apps or Office on your PC and Mac—saving all your versions in one place. Sharing files, large or small, is also easier on SkyDrive because you can send out a link to the doc to avoid attachment size limits. Also, you can use the link to edit the doc even after you send it to others.Yet despite the efficiency of the cloud, the vast majority of people still cling to email attachments. What’s holding people back? While some services solve the attachment problem better than others the real enemy is inertia. We spend so much of our time in email that attachments seem like the most convenient option.
There are two key things we are doing to address this inertia:
1. Connecting SkyDrive to webmail
Our primary approach has been to bring SkyDrive into the natural place where people send files, which as we’ve mentioned is email. Hotmail allows you to easily send documents and photos via SkyDrive. The integration of Office Web Apps means you won’t lose your formatting when you send your files as online documents. And you can even configure Hotmail to always send files using SkyDrive by default.Of course, for people using services like Gmail, you can access your email right from Hotmail as well as import your contacts. This way, you can send those links to SkyDrive files using the Hotmail features, while still keeping your Gmail identity.
Already, files uploaded to SkyDrive represent over 15% of the total number of email attachments sent via Hotmail every month. This share is growing rapidly – with monthly uploads to SkyDrive up over 90% in the last year alone.
2. Making it easy for other apps and services to work with SkyDrive
We know that people share files using many different devices, apps and email clients. That’s a key reason why we’ve focused on making it easy for developers to add SkyDrive to their experiences.
An example is Xobni who recently released a SkyDrive Gadget. If you use Xobni for Outlook, it’s easy to email a link to a file on SkyDrive without leaving Outlook. Use the gadget to find the SkyDrive file that you want to share. With a single click, you can copy the link to your clipboard or compose a new message including the link.
Tips for avoiding attachment problems
To help overcome inertia, we have launched a new site www.attachmentssuck.com to help you teach your friends how to make the switch from attachments to SkyDrive. Encourage your friends and co-workers to start saving themselves (and you) hours of time.In addition, here are a few power tips that are particularly relevant if you share presentations frequently. (You can get other tips for avoiding attachments, here.)
Tip 1: Upload and organize presentations on SkyDrive
Upload your presentations (or any other file) to SkyDrive. You may also want to use folders or subfolders to keep all of your presentations related to a particular topic or customer in one place. That way, it’s easy for you to reference and easy for recipients to find content—with a single a link to your folder.
Upload your presentation to SkyDrive
Organize your presentations by subject
Choose to share an entire folder, or just one file
Tip 2: Share frequently used presentations right from Outlook
If you install the SkyDrive Gadget for Xobni, you can send a link to SkyDrive files right from Outlook. Just click the SkyDrive gadget tab in the Xobni app, find the file you want to share, and click “Email a Link” to pop up an email window with the link.
Unlike other cloud services, SkyDrive integrates with Office Web Apps so your recipients don’t need to have the same version of Office that you do (or any Office software) to be able to view what you send them. Also, thanks to our recent sharing improvements, you can easily share files in any of your SkyDrive folders without having to copy or move them to a special folder.
Note: The Xobni gadget gives your recipients access to view files only. If you want to let them edit your doc or add files to a folder, visit SkyDrive.com to get a link to view and edit.
Tip 3: Send once, update often
If you’ll need to make edits to the presentation later, open it from SkyDrive in PowerPoint 2010 and pin the presentation to your Windows 7 taskbar for easy access. Then you can easily update it on your PC and anyone with your link will automatically have access to the updated version.Tip 4: Share your presentation like an expert
If you’re giving your presentation remotely or on a screen, you can include a unique bit.ly link on the last slide that directs viewers to your presentation on your SkyDrive. Just go to bit.ly, enter the SkyDrive address of your presentation, hit “customize” and enter a unique and descriptive title after the forward slash. Like: bit.ly/skydriveecards.
If you’re giving handouts of your presentation, you can create a QR code to include on the printed version, linking to your presentation on SkyDrive, so meeting attendees can scan the tag/code and access the presentation. To add a QR code to your bit.ly link, just append .qr to the end of the URL like so: bit.ly/skydriveecards.qr. Click the link, and you’ve got your QR code.
Tip 5: Present from anywhere
When you’re on the road, you can view and edit the presentation from anywhere—even if you’re on a device without Office, using the Office Web Apps on SkyDrive.
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