Drag and drop or multiple select attachments

[DavLud2]

About half of our users have decided that they can not use the Zimbra Web client because they feel it takes much too long to perform common everyday tasks, like sending an email with a large attachment for example.

After I explained the "alpha" unfinished nature of Zimbra Desktop, many of these users were anxious to give it a try, and here are the top two comments:

1) Yay it has an Outbox!
2) Still painful to add attachments!

Will there be a drag-and-drop attachment feature or at least the ability to shift- or control-select multiple attachments along with a quicker way to navigate to a folder you have open on your desktop?

One user brought me over to show me an open folder on his Mac containing 3 files he needed to attach to an email he was composing, and demonstrated how crazy it is that he had to click Browse and then navigate 6 folders deep to get there.

[jholder]

Originally Posted by DavLud2

About half of our users have decided that they can not use the Zimbra Web client because they feel it takes much too long to perform common everyday tasks, like sending an email with a large attachment for example.

After I explained the "alpha" unfinished nature of Zimbra Desktop, many of these users were anxious to give it a try, and here are the top two comments:

1) Yay it has an Outbox!
2) Still painful to add attachments!

Will there be a drag-and-drop attachment feature or at least the ability to shift- or control-select multiple attachments along with a quicker way to navigate to a folder you have open on your desktop?

One user brought me over to show me an open folder on his Mac containing 3 files he needed to attach to an email he was composing, and demonstrated how crazy it is that he had to click Browse and then navigate 6 folders deep to get there.

Heh-
I don't like to predict the future. There is a certain video floating around of a certain engineer (not me) saying that you can't offer Zimbra offline. Now look at us!

Integration between the desktop and the browser is a touchy subject in terms of security. Browsers don't really allow drag and drop from the desktop (unless you want to open the said document in the browser).

There may be a ticket open for this, and we're trying to figure out something. . .but as of now. . .we dont' have a way.

Best,
john

[DavLud2]

John,

I appreciate your thoughts on the subject.

I do understand the restrictions regarding drag-and-drop to the browser, and even the reluctance to have to rely on plug-ins to the various browsers, in order to achieve this functionality.

How about drag-and-drop to an optional task- or menu-bar widget of some sort, perhaps even the Toaster with an expanded purpose? Perhaps the widget could simply collect and pass the file path information back to the email being composed and populate the fields for me. Not quite as glamorous as drag-and-drop to the email directly, but if it means no more manual navigation and multiple clicks of the "Browse" button and repeated scrolling through directory file lists, we would have a lot of happy campers here.

Thanks again for listening,
Dave

[Cryophallion]

While I can understand the difficulty of the drag and drop part, I think the comment on using shift or ctrl clicks to select multiple files should be much easier to implement, and solve most of the problem. Most programs that do this have text in the file line that looks like this: "1.jpg" "2.jpg" "3.jpg" and so on, if that gives you any clues on how to code it. I can try to look for programs that do this if it might give some inspiration.

Bug #: Bug 7561

[maron]

Hi.

We recently finished migration from Exchange 2003 to Zimbra in 10 small offices worldwide, we're facing the same complaint but have solved half of it.

We have successfully been using the firefox drag & drop upload plugin for the upload part.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2190

Probably it could be rewritten slightly to give fancier results, but for now it works.

However, this does not solve the download part. I think that what's being asked for should be achievable via a java applet. Look for example at the upload functionality in gallery2.sf.net.

I think this should be split into 2 issues though, 1 is download and then upload is another - very different things from the browser security model to tackle.

Best regards,

Maron

[DavLud2]

Originally Posted by maron

We have successfully been using the firefox drag & drop upload plugin for the upload part.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2190

Probably it could be rewritten slightly to give fancier results, but for now it works.

Yes it does seem to be working for me on both Mac and PC platforms. I will be testing it further, but so far so good.

Thank you very much for the info!

Now if we could just find a solution that streamlines downloading those multiple attachments...

[Tylast]

Hrmmmm, not having too much luck with FF 3.0.1.

Update: I got it to work once, but not again. It's inconsistent.