File attachments can really bog down a corporate network. It just takes one user to send a 5MB MPEG of a dancing hamster to his team to see how wasteful they can be. You end up with giant Outlook folders and gobbled-up bandwidth. It appears a company called Creo has an interesting idea – everytime you send attachments, the Creo Token software compresses and encrypts everything into a “bundle”, but then sends a “token” instead of the actual file. With the Creo Redeemer software, your recipient can cash in the token, which points to the sender’s file bundle still residing on the sender’s hard drive.
Personally, I think they could do even better – how about having the sender’s bundle uploaded to centrally accessible, fast file servers, say an internal one for internal communications, and an external one on the Internet for extra-office email? I think there could even be a business opportunity for someone to offer Internet “public storage” for tokened files. The server can be configured to automatically destroy all files which have had their tokens redeemed, or after a preset amount of time.
Then, there will be none of this hard drive snooping business going on.