Just because you CAN doesn’t mean you SHOULD. The irony…
Here’s a post with a personal example today. We live and work in an age where bandwidth is becoming more readily available in many more places. Being able to access more information, send information, and share information is much better today than in years past; however, as noted in the wise words of Uncle Ben in Spiderman, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
How many of you have found yourself on the receiving end of some email that has one or more multiple megabyte sized attachments on them? (What’s even better is when this happens as you are traveling and you are accessing your mail from your Smartphone or PDA) How many of you have received a successive string of them from someone with the explanation of, “I’m sending this in multiple mails since it was too large to send in one mail and was blocked by the firewall due to size.” Hello!!!! Did that alert not tell you anything??? It should NOT have been to send the information in 10 mails vs. one as you are still sending too much information via email.
The topic of mailbox limits and storage, etc. have long been a topic of discussion on many Partner forums because of this growing trend of large emails being sent because they now can be due to better bandwidth. Now ask yourself, how many of those clients you are helping with this situation have Windows Server, SBS, or SharePoint Server in their company? If they do, they all have access to at least Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services or possibly the full Microsoft Office SharePoint Server technologies in their companies to utilize to cut down on the excessive use of large email attachments, that ultimately only leads to old versions lying around, being overwritten, etc. Not to mention the benefits of versioning, tracking, check-in/check-out, and so much more they get with SharePoint technologies. If they don’t have any of those technologies in-house, they also could utilize Microsoft SharePoint Online which provides a hosted solution to solve this problem.
Here is the personal example from today that truly highlights how bad this really can get. I finally reached my limit a little over a month ago when I was traveling and received a notice on my Pocket PC that my mailbox was “closed” due to exceeding my storage limit. I could not figure out how that happened since I was not close to my limit when I had left in the morning. Sure enough, once I got logged on with my laptop, I noticed the “Perfect Storm” of email from that day. Numerous recurring meeting requests with 5-20MB embedded files in each of them in addition to a series of emails with large, multi-MB attachments on them, all coming in within a few hours. That’s when I setup a rule in Outlook that automatically deletes any message over a certain size and has the server auto-respond with the following message:
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Now here’s the real irony and example of how bad this is. If you look closely at the image above, you’ll notice that one was sent out today. You know how I got it? Because the person who had sent me the multi-MB email this morning and had received my auto-reply forwarded it to me in email with a note that said, “JFYI – in case you didn’t know – getting this when sending any attachment thru to you.” Ummmm, why do you think that is?!?!?!? Geez…
So there is plenty of opportunity out there for all of you Partners to help your clients take advantage of the benefits of Microsoft’s various SharePoint technologies, both on-premise and online. It can be a real cost-savings to your clients and a big efficiency builder plus resource management benefit for them, not to mention a big opportunity for you as their trusted advisor to help them elevate their business efficiency and differentiate you from your competitors. As a reminder, I have a bunch of Microsoft SharePoint Tips & Tricks and Resources posted up on the Blog from an earlier post for anyone wanting to learn a bit more.
Thank you and have a wonderful day,
Eric Ligman – Follow me on 
Global Partner Experience Lead
Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights
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Comments
Anonymous
May 01, 2009
PingBack from http://microsoft-sharepoint.simplynetdev.com/just-because-you-can-doesn%e2%80%99t-mean-you-should-the-irony%e2%80%a6/Anonymous
May 01, 2009
PingBack from http://asp-net-hosting.simplynetdev.com/just-because-you-can-doesn%e2%80%99t-mean-you-should-the-irony%e2%80%a6/Anonymous
May 04, 2009
The screen shot of your Auto-Responder message is very helpful. A useful example. We're wondering though if you figured out how to move this forward given the recipient sent it to you "FYI"? We'd be particularly interested in your ideas about how to respond if the "offending party" is a Customer (not a colleague). Thank you for sharing this. We absolutely feel your pain.Anonymous
May 05, 2009
@ Michael - If the person sending this is someone outside your organization, such as a customer, you can still utilize a solution such as the SharePoint Online I mentioned above or even something like SkyDrive (http://skydrive.live.com). If it is someone they want to share documents with often, they can also allow access to their internal SharePoint for that person by purchasing the proper CALs to do so.