is not easy. It contains hidden dangers, weights of minute books and even reference numbers. Lots of them.
Yeah.
(geek alert)
A reference number is a unique number given to each letter officialy sent by EYP Greece. This contains all external communication such as with potential sponsors and media partners, but also formal invitations to participants of sessions, internal communication with the members of EYP Greece etc. The general secretary’s duty is to keep track of these numbers, keep the actual registry of the original letters etc.
Which brings us to my problem. So far I have tried to collect the letters as .pdf attachments to emails sent to me by the members authorised to use reference numbers (Head Organisers, members of the Board of EYP Greece etc.). All these emails are filed under a certain label in my eypgreece.org Google Apps account (let’s call it GG).
So, I admit it; I haven’t really thought of what I would do in the end to actually store these files offline until today. Big mistake.
I’m only writing this here because I came up with a solution with three different implementations and I need to figure out the best one, in terms of complexity. Plus, I need a sparkle of hope in my miserable life as a secretary general.
The goal is to store all these files in a dropbox folder. (If you don’t know what Dropbox is, there is absolutely no point in reading the rest of the post). For this, I used the Send to Dropbox app and generated an email address that stores all the attachments of the email it receives in a specific folder. The drawback here is that you cannot share the folder.
In order to forward all the existent GG labeled emails I had only the choice of setting up another account and do some IMAP things with a client which of course is not a good option, in terms of complexity again. So for these, I’ll have to do it manually (drawback no 2. A small one, as the amount of the emails is not that huge for some reason…)
But what about the new emails? What is the best algorithm, also in terms of sustainability? Basically, I need to create a filter at Google Apps and gather these emails automatically instead of manually. There are three main ways to do so:
1. Ask the people authorised to send me these emails with a specific subject. Now I’m experienced enough to say that my beloved digital illiterare EYPers won’t do this.
2. Set up a seperate email account (e.g. gg@eypgreece.org) and ask them to send the .pdf files directly there. This seems to be the best idea so far. A couple of minutes of setup to also receive these emails in my own eypgr account and done! Also, this is a sustainable solution, as every future secretary general will be able to use it.
3. Set up a seperate email account (e.g. gg@eypgreece.org) and ask them to bcc every email also there. This takes solution number 2 one step further, in order to achieve instant archiving. One issue would be the extra files attached which will be also saved to the dropbox folder, but seriously we do not organise that many events and produce that huge quantities of material in order to cause an overolad.
All in all, I tend to No.2 for now, as there are still lots of already sent email (to others) that need to be sent (to me). In the future, when EYP Greece launches a new project, I guess we could try No.3.
Another possible implementation is to use another tool I came across recently; ifttt. “ifttt” stands for “if this, then that” and it is a small nifty service, still in private beta. It will do the same job either with the “Email subject” solution (1) or the No.2 solution. The technical aspects (Gmail filters) might be slightly different, but you get the point.
What do you think? Reference numbers consist an important issue for EYP Greece right now; there is always a bureaucratic nightmare after a series of dream sessions…
