Quote:
Originally Posted by exaltedwombat
Well, you've got to email them saying the book is ready! Why not simply attach the goods? You were the one complaining your method caused problems!
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First (see last note), that didn't really work, either, even when we did email them. Secondly, we don't actually "email" them. We send a message from within the PM system (project management) which is browser-based. We "attach" the relevant files to that message. It's almost exactly like a forum post with an attachment; the notification to them has a link to the (secured) attached files.
Email's not secure. We have some heavy-hitter clients, like the "Men are from Mars..." guy, Jackie Collins, etc. I'm not name-dropping; but we get asked about the book security a LOT, and I have to demonstrate all of it, from intake to production to sending the files to the Amazon S3 archives.
From our clients' viewpoint--how they
see it--everything IS done by email. The PM system has a mailserver, and every "message" we put on the message board for the project gets sent out as an email. The incoming emails (each client's project has a unique email address, so that all incoming messages, emails, etc, are automatically routed) are posted as messages (or comments) to the relevant project (or relevant file, respectively) and that's how we make sure that a client's email doesn't sit in my inbox, or my assistant's, and get overlooked. What does happen occasionally, though, is they log in to the browser interface (where they can see all the task due dates, milestones for file uploads, etc.) and they decide to download the file from there, rather than the link we send them in the email, which is somewhat transparent. Usually, they can't find the downloaded file; sometimes they can't get ADE or Previewer to work; sometimes, all three or more things that we can't make up.
We have between 100-200 books in production at any given time. Emailing from a regular email system really isn't viable; it's a recipe for disaster, from any organization standpoint.
And, yes, we had almost as many problems, if not more, when we DID email them (about two years ago), because invariably, they'd double-click the attached file to launch it, like a Word file, before they'd read the instructions that said, "don't double-click the attached file." I had near-daily complaints that "the Word file I'd sent them" didn't work. So...that wasn't a perfect solution, either. (And, yes: we put, "
DO NOT DOUBLE CLICK THE ATTACHED FILE" in bright red text at the top of the email, too.)
Hitch