B. Mann Consulting

For many knowledge workers, e-mail is still one of (if not the) the primary means of communication. Various document management or knowledge management systems are not natural, don't integrate with work flow.

Within an organization, sending out e-mail after e-mail filled with attachments causes a couple of issues:

• burdens the corporate e-mail system
• problems with different versions floating around
• easy for sensitive material to get passed around
• once it leaves the inbox, no idea where the document goes within an organization

EGADS is an idea to address all the afore-mentioned issues. It is a server-side application with hooks into the corporate e-mail system. Much like virus-scanners today (if you consider e-mail processing to be a pipe, EGADS would sit after a virus-scanner; it could also itself have an add-on module that had virus-scanning functionality), EGADS looks at all attachments that pass through the system.

At its most basic, EGADS strips attachments from e-mail messages, places the attachment in a web-accessible location, and ads the URL to the original attachment into an email before sending it on.