To Share or Overshare, nah Attach it.

To Share or Overshare, nah Attach it.

Content is king, but without the capacity to share that content it isn't worth the paper it isn't written on. Maybe not my most eloquent thought... The core of the concept, or rather the question I want so much to answer is, in the enterprise why is the evolution of sharing such a difficult hill to climb?

Over the years how you obtain content has changed dramatically. Ever changing text like what you are reading right now, literally at your fingertips moments after it is published. Inside the enterprise world however, creating, collaborating and sharing in many organizations struggles to move forward. The troublesome, "forward that attachment to me", sounds like, "I rather prefer horseback" to my ears.

I am not going to sell you on a particular service like OneDrive|SharePoint , Box.com , Slack , etc. The brand is in itself a debate for another time and article. What I am speaking to is sharing content versus sending content. Briefly let's evaluate pros and cons of sending an attachment and for our purposes let's assume this is a spreadsheet, document or presentation.

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Email Attachments

Cons:

  • Once it is sent, you cannot get it back.
  • Content sent can be forwarded, to anyone.
  • Once you send it and realize you need to make a change, you now need to send it again (and likely again), now which version do You have versus They have?
  • If your company takes document retention seriously, its lifespan will be limited.

Pros:

  • Some colleagues seem to only be able to consume content this way.
  • For some, searching their archived email is all they know how to search.

Modern Sharing

Cons:

  • It feels like extra steps to send a link to the document, instead of attach it.
  • What if someone makes a change, or I want them to make a change and send them read only, i.e. overhead for management of the content.

Pros:

  • Version Control. We can collaborate or not, but the content can be rolled back (some platforms you must turn this feature on).
  • Content owner can contain who sees the content, disallow forwarding and track who has accessed it.
  • No lack of clarity of what version everyone is using, we are all on the current 'version'.
  • #collaboration happens real time (really a bonus when in a WFH environment).

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I Won't and I Won't

So this to me is about the evolution of a technology. An obvious step forward in efficiency, security and ease of use. All that being said I would be willing to bet you have had at least a couple of people respond to a share with something like, 'Stop sending me those links and just send me the document!'

So help me hive mind, why is this evolution of technology such a monumental leap for so many?

Harvey Karlovac

International Trade Compliance (Views are my own)

1 年

Hi again Phil, one comment I can give is that to “share” you have to buy into a certain platform whereas email is more agnostic, for both the sender and the recipient

Jeff Hileman

not having fun at work, you're doing it wrong

1 年

It's the extra step of 1) saving the file somewhere 2) setting permissions 3) sending the email. Generally, people are lazy or said more elegantly, will take the path of least resistance. MSFT, for instance, has done a good job removing resistance over the last several years. Prompting folks if they want to share instead of attach when sending an email. Auto-provisioning permissions, adding lots of features that help with collaboration, etc. It makes me cringe to be on an email thread where people are passing an attachment back and forth adding their initials or a version number to the file for each iteration. You know you who are ;) So what do you do Phil Orin? You're responsible for information security, governance, and enabling the business to scale. Make it more difficult for users to send emails with attachments; increase resistance and people will take another path. For example, you could make the O365 Defender scan take 20x longer. Waiting 10 minutes before you can open an attachment will motivate people to try that new fan-dangled sharing doodad.

Jim Ash

It’s revival or bust

1 年

I’m a fan of the link/folder share. Much more collaborative and governance.

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