The most common problem on campus
Without a doubt, the most common user issue we have on campus is students that do the following:
- Click a link to a Word document in their Gmail (or somewhere else on the web).
- When asked if they want to open of save the document, they select open.
- They work on the document for a couple of hours and then hit save.
- They log out.
The issue with this is that when you pick the open option in the open/save dialogue, the document gets downloaded into your “Temporary Internet Files” and then opened from there. It works, but Temporary Internet Files is a highly volatile place to store documents, in particular when Internet Explorer is set up to clear the folder when you log out (to keep roaming profile size to a minimum). In other words, the changes the student worked on are gone.
I don’t know how to solve this. I’m looking for a solution that does either of the following:
- Defaults to save and disables the open option for particular file types in Internet Explorer.
- Forces users to “save as” when the document has been “opened” through a browser.
Anyone?
4 comments
For Windows, you might consider using “MirrorFolder” from TechSoft to create a RAID1 mirror of the Temporary Internet Files folder to another location and set MirrorFolder’s option to not mirror file delete operations… should all work for you
http://www.techsoftpl.com/backup/
That way if a desperate student comes crying, you will be able to find his/her file in the mirror.
ps. IMHO “MirrorFolder” is a wonderful and unique piece of software.
pps. Are you involved with fluxBB at all, or is it a completely separate project?
Of course on *Nix systems rsync based tools like rdiff and rdiff-backup etc. might be suitable.
The basic idea is the same, how you implement it is up to you.
Well, I guess we could do something like that, but it seems a bit backwards. The contents of Temporary Internet Files is not something we want to store at all. It’s temporary for a reason :)
I’m no longer involved in neither FluxBB or PunBB. I left the PunBB project after which a bunch of the other developers forked the project into FluxBB.
I guess you should be glad that such a silly issue is the most common problem on your campus. My most common issue at my campus is the server with all our course materials going down for 4 days at a time
Firefox does let you specify that certain types should be always saved/opened/etc, if that’s an option.