Monday, July 17, 2006

Meet My Twisted Sister, Bruce! (Re: Domino TNEF Extraction)

Listening to the latest Taking Notes Podcast (#25), towards the end Bruce and Julian are talking about the Domino 7.0.2 feature that will extract the files embedded in TNEF objects sent from MS Outlook. These are the wonderful winmail.dat files that we all love. In discussing this, though, you can faintly hear Bruce singing "We're not gonna take it..." That's hilarious!!

When I first heard that the TNEF extraction would be added to the Domino server, I was torn. First, as an MS FUD fighter, I felt just as Bruce was (jokingly) singing. Why should we kowtow to the proprietary email format used by Outlook. We shouldn't just take it! But IBM probably decided that they wouldn't take any more user complaints and just work around the issue. From an admin's standpoint, I heartily applaud IBM on this. It will be great for 7.0.2+ servers to have this natively. I, hopefully, won't have to field the complaints from the "higher-ups" in my company who just feel that all email should work together. Well, thanks to this feature from IBM, utopia is one step closer!

Speaking of the TNEF extraction, Julian posted a mail-in database that will currently work to extract the TNEF objects. It works well and is fast! I have already implemented that in my environment, so the next time this happens we can tell users just to forward the email to the "Winmail" address. Details on Julian's tool can be found here at his blog. If you're an admin who hasn't downloaded this, you should go snag it!

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