Desktop Applications and E-mail

So much for scheduling. But there are other applications that we’d like to e-mail enable. For example, how about sending our spreadsheets (or documents) directly to an e-mail recipient, but doing so from inside the spreadsheet (or word processor) program itself? Microsoft and Lotus, among other desktop application vendors, have put this ability inside their Office suite of products.

Let’s say we want to send a Word document to someone via Exchange. There are two ways to do this. If we are in Word, the command is File|Send To|Mail Recipient. In our case, this brings up an e-mail message form in Microsoft Exchange with the name of our file as an attachment. A second way is to save the file in Word and close it. Then browse our files with Windows Explorer and right-click on the file name. You’ll see a Send To option on the small menu that pops up beside the file name. Choose Exchange, and it will bring up the message form as before.

You still have to fill out the right address in the message form, and you still have to remember to send the message. But those are relatively small tasks, compared to trying to locate a file that you were just working on someplace on your hard disk.

If you have installed more than one e-mail program on your computer, this might not always work the way we have described. You may have additional e-mail programs listed on the Send To menu, depending on how you installed these programs.

The issue here is that you often don’t realize how your desktop is configured until you try to make use of this integration feature and want to send a file from one of your applications. If your actions launch the right e-mail software, that’s all well and good. But if some other e-mail program appears, then you are at a loss over what to do and how to fix it. Do you make some changes to your e-mail configuration? Or is there something inside the operating system, such as a control panel dialogue box, that needs fixing?

Part of the blame for this confusion lies with some of the desktop integration “standards” such as VIM and MAPI, which we’ll get into later in this chapter