To link or not to link... that is the question

  • Article

We get a lot of questions about mail co-existence and document links so I wanted to quickly blog about how doc links work in Messaging Co-Existence

Using Links: The idea behind a link in a message is, instead of sending the actual document in a message to send a link to the original. This is useful when multiple people would like to collaborate on the same document. Both the Outlook and Notes client have features around document sharing and links, but the question is what happens in a co-existence state.

Links in Outlook/Exchange sent over to Notes/Domino: (Good !)

Outlook 2003 uses WSS to share documents. When you attach a document in Outlook you can select the option for a document workspace. Outlook will automatically create a document workspace in WSS for the document and send a HTML link in the message back to that workspace. 

  

When the message is passed through the Exchange connector to Domino then opened by a Notes client, the HTML content is preserved and the Notes client can select the link. Notes will then open the WSS workspace from within the Notes client interface providing the Notes client access to the WSS collaboration tools for that document.

 

Links in Notes/Domino sent over to Outlook/Exchange: (OK)

Getting links to work from Domino to Exchange is a more difficult. The DOC link in Notes link is a proprietary link to a document stored within a given Notes database. When a message with a link is routed to Exchange through the connector there are three options for handling links. These options will be detailed in the next blog.

Using NDL for Notes/Domino DOC links: (Another Option)

The other option for DOC links from Notes is to have them converted to .NDL attachments. When a .NDL attachment is opened from within Outlook it will launch the Notes client and bring up the Notes document. Since .NDL attachments are not blocked by Outlook, and does not require HTML on the domino server this may be a better option. However, right now the Exchange connector does not create .NDL attachments, so only option for this is to use a third-party doc-link converter such as provided by Genii software https://www.geniisoft.com/ called CoexLinks. CoexLinks runs on the Domino server and convert links to .NDL attachments before accessed by the connector and sent to Exchange.

 

Erik