Question: As sales manager of a multimillion-dollar company, I’m on the road much of the time. I exchange at least a dozen e-mail messages with the main office every day. But because I receive so many file attachments, downloading takes me forever. Can you recommend a solution?
Mobile Computing HelpDesk Responds:
Downloading e-mail can be frustrating when you’re on the road. E-mail is the application used most frequently by mobile workers, and to date, few vendors have addressed issues related to speed — or for that matter, control. Nothing is more frustrating than sitting at your laptop waiting for a large file that you know you don’t need right away, while critical messages are put on hold.
One solution you may want to consider is Traveling Software’s LapLink Enterprise Exchange Accelerator. The accelerator combines advanced compression with a high performance delivery protocol and attachment filtering to speed up your e-mail up to 1500 percent.
Downloading e-mail remotely is slow partly because of inefficiencies between your company’s server and the mail client. With the Accelerator, all your communication occurs between the Exchange Accelerator Server and the mail client, which is far more efficient, and therefore much faster.
One of the Accelerator’s useful features is its advanced message filtering. Say you’ve been on vacation for two weeks, and as soon as you get back you’re called out of town. You don’t want to spend hours downloading two weeks’ worth of e-mail from the road. With the Accelerator, you can choose which e-mail you want to see immediately and save the rest for when you return to a faster connection in the office.
With the Accelerator, you can also filter your attachments, even on the fly. Say you begin downloading messages and you realize that you’re about to receive a very lengthy attachment you don’t immediately need. You can simply skip this message before it arrives.
The Accelerator also allows you to receive messages and skip attachments. It’s attachments that make downloading e-mail so slow. By specifying a maximum attachment size, you automatically exclude lengthy documents while speeding up your e-mail delivery dramatically. If you decide that one particular attachment is important, you simply click on the attachment icon. Even if you choose not to filter your attachments, the Accelerator’s compression technique allows you to receive attachments up to 30 percent faster.
A program like the Accelerator also saves time. You can configure the Accelerator to dial in to the network at a pre-set time to send and receive mail. It automatically disconnects when the mail is delivered, saving not only time, but connection costs as well.
