Re: Centralizing Online Documentation

[Lisa Higgins <Lisa -dot- Higgins -at- LEVEL3 -dot- COM>]

Nagai, Paul wrote:

> With no server or CD tower, it gets pretty hard. Could you
> have users e-mail
> requests and hire someone (or assign someone) to reply? That
> makes a small,
> $2,000 server look pretty cheap to me, though. Could you
> distribute from a
> mainframe (which is just a giant server you may already own).

I think you could do this fairly cheaply and simply with a PC running
Pegasus Mail all the time. You can define a set of commands, then set up
rules to trigger. For example, you could have a rule that says that every
time you receive an email with "Send Document 616" in the Subject: line, it
attaches a copy of Document 616 to an email and pops it off to the sender.
All you really need to have on the PC is Pegasus. It doesn't even need to be
a dedicated system, really. You could map a drive on your PC to wherever
your documents are stored, and just have it grab them off there. If it would
be too distracting to have your email doing all this churning while you're
trying to work, you could have a dedicated email address for these requests,
and set it up as a second user or something, then log that user in when you
go to lunch or leave for the day.

If you're concerned about security, you can add to the rule that the user's
address must come from within your company.

I haven't done this myself, but I have found in the past that Pegasus does a
pretty good job of performing smaller one-to-many and one-to-one automated
communications. If there's something wrong with this solution, feel free to
correct me.

You can also do this using a big old listserver, but they are fairly
complicated to set up, in my limited experience, and would probably be
overkill in this case.

Lisa.


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