SkyDrive ends the secret life of the attachment

Published by Adam Fraser on March 30, 2012

GLOBAL – An email attachment. For most of us, it’s a simple thing. You open up the email client on your phone (or your computer) and send something, to someone. You might imagine it pinging across cyberspace with little wings. But what actually happens to that attachment? It’s far from being so straightfoward, it seems. Infact, according to an infographic shared by the SkyDrive team – via Twitter, your attachment is leading quite an extraordinary secret life. 

Unfortunately, in order to fit the image into our post some of the text is difficult to read. However, you can download the full-sized version.
Life of an attachment

It’s estimated that we send 15 emails a day with an attachment, which to equates to 5000 per year, per person. Obviously, there are lots of people who’ll say they hardly send nowhere near that many – myself included. But remember, we’re talking on average here.

Sending attachments back and forth between co-workers trying to finalise the final copy is annoying to say the least. It seems that 77 per-cent of workers that send attachments are required to be edited by a group of people and that 44 per-cent of documents sent by email go through at least three versions before they are made final version.

With the journey of the attachment being a troubled, busy one, there is a way to put an end to the flood of attachments that arrive in your inbox.

Nokia Lumia 620

Compact, vibrant, and lots of fun.

The family is growing.

SkyDrive on your Nokia Lumia 610, Nokia Lumia 710, Nokia Lumia 800 or Nokia Lumia 900 means the attachments can always be held online, never having to take up valuable space in your email. You can also make any edits to the document without ever having to download it. Plus, if you share it with your colleagues, you’ll all have access to that same file. And with 62 per-cent of people losing files sent to them in attachments, storing them all in your very own SkyDrive, means they’re always available.

Are you a SkyDrive user? Tell us how you use it and what you think of it, in the comments below.

Image credit: Generalantilles

Comments

  • Karen Bartlett

    Great infographic. Although, for my mother, an attachment is the devil and never a simple thing. Maybe this is why she should get a Lumia.  

  • Erkki Ruohtula

    The saddest thing about attachments is that most of the time they are used completely  unnecessarily. People all too often add Word or PowerPoint files to a mail just to send a paragraph or two of text that could just as well been inserted into the message itself, which would have been faster to access, and would have consumed much less bandwith and storage.
    About Skydrive, I did some experiments with its online document tools last year, comparing them to Google’s and found them wanting. The word processor had display glitches even when used with a recent Internet Explorer. The photo gallery oddly did not obey the orientation of my photographs, making portrait pictures appear sideways, and offering no tools to fix this (sent feedback about this, but as far as I can tell, that was never read by anyone).  Microsoft needs to work on Skydrive it before it can be considered a good competitor to the G offerings. Hopefully Nokia can prod them, now that they have a big stake in the success of Skydrive!