Users, Webmail, Editing Attachments and Losing Work

[sonofsanta]

I imagine this will be a familiar refrain to many of you here, but we're finally getting sick of it.

 

Every day someone will, without fail, email some work in to themselves, open the attachment from their Webmail, spend an hour working on it then click Save and log off. The file is lurking in temporary internet files on the local machine and sometimes can be recovered, sometimes cannot, but always wastes our time. No matter how much we tell people to Save As, or Save from webmail in the first place, they never learn the lesson until they've done it wrong once, and I don't have the patience to fix & explain it 1200 times.

 

I've had a look through the Word GPO options and there's no way of setting files in location X (e.g. temp internet files) to be forced to stay in protected mode or otherwise made uneditable, which would be my preferred option. I've had a look at the IE options and there's no way of forcing all files of type *.docx (etc.) to be downloaded instead of opened, which would also work, although it would interfere with the VLE - but perhaps that's the lesser of two evils. I might be able to do it with reg keys and GPP but if I can avoid the annoyance with the VLE, I'd like to.

 

So has anyone ever come across a way of preventing this happening? Bonus marks if you can tell me a way of doing it with Outlook as well, as staff are equally as culpable as students here.

[Danp]

I know exactly what you mean as it happens here too, although not as much as it does for you by the sounds of it.

[FN-GM]

Surely teach them not to do it? If they are at home any changes you apply won't stop them from loosing it.

[sonofsanta]

Surely teach them not to do it? If they are at home any changes you apply won't stop them from loosing it.

 

Believe me, we've tried:

No matter how much we tell people to Save As, or Save from webmail in the first place, they never learn the lesson until they've done it wrong once, and I don't have the patience to fix & explain it 1200 times.

 

And as much as I want to say "lesson learnt", it still takes up our time every single time.

[FN-GM]

Believe me, we've tried:

 

 

And as much as I want to say "lesson learnt", it still takes up our time every single time.

 

They got told about it here, we never hear of the issue anymore.

[sonofsanta]

They got told about it here, we never hear of the issue anymore.

 

In which case I can only envy you your users!

[FN-GM]

In which case I can only envy you your users!

 

Im actually a little surprised the issue has gone away!

[MordyT]

Simply start a list, each person gets one attempt to restore files and a stern reminder, then when they call, say sorry, can't restore. They learn quick that way.

[Firefox]

You could just remove (ghost out) the save button lol This way they'd have to use Save As.

 

Users wanting to save exisitng docs could still use Ctrl+S