Is this the end of email attachments? | IT Xchange Computer Warehouse

How many times a day do you receive an email with an image or document attached? For most business users, the answer is at least two or three. Email attachments have become an important tool in the digital age, a means of instantaneously sending files that, a few years ago, would need to be faxed or worse – snail mailed. 

Recently, Microsoft has revealed that they are planning to make email simpler for their Outlook users. Here’s the catch: the simplification involves eliminating attachments as we know them.

The goal of the reorganization is to cut back on the number of steps involved in creating, editing, opening, and re-sending documents as attachments. As a part of the process facelift, the Outlook Web App and OneDrive for Business will come together to link attachments from Outlook messages into OneDrive documents that are stored in the cloud.

Not only does the update give users greater multitasking ability, but improves the collaboration process. Documents shared with OWA via OneDrive can be accessed by multiple users at once, and gives collaborators the option to reply to the document email within a single streamlined interface.

In addition to increased accessibility, the new features allow users to open the “attachment” in a side-by-side view alongside the original email. Don’t ring the death toll for old-fashioned attachments just yet, though – users can still send locally stored files using the traditional method, so users who aren’t ready to make the jump into the cloud can continue to use OWA without worry.

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