Report opening notification

[Rahul Ba]

We have an application which sends reports by email. These reports are in the formats pdf, csv, xls, xlsx. A few of the reports are generated by our application and a few of them are generated by a third party engine like BO.

Now, we want add feature where whenever a user opens a report (i.e. the actual file) we should get a notifcation. Therefore we can find out how many actual users open the report

[Dave Tolls]

What do you mean by "open the report"?
Do you mean through your application?

[Rahul Ba]

We sent email with attachment. Attachment can be in pdf, xls, csv, txt formats. We want know how many user opened the file.so need some mechanism.

[Dave Tolls]

Rahul Ba wrote:We sent email with attachment. Attachment can be in pdf, xls, csv, txt formats. We want know how many user opened the file.so need some mechanism.

You can't.
Unless you provide them an application that is the only one they can use to open each of those types of document, and then that application informs you it has opened file X.

Of course then you'd get informed of every file they opened of those types, whether emailed or not.

[Tony Docherty]

As Dave has said this is not easy. The only solutions I can think of is to provide your users with an email client that sends notifications back to you when the user opens the email attachments but this relies on your users using only your email reader to open your emails. Or wrap the attachments in a propriety file which can only be opened by an application you provide. This application shows the attachments and allows them to be opened, sending you a notification in the process.

[Dave Tolls]

I'm also not sure what is gained by this?

I can't see any useful statistics that can be gleaned from it.
If you want to know how many people are interested in the report that has been emailed then I would not attach the report.
I would provide a link to download it from some simple web app that notes a download, and who.
That will provide as much useful info as anything else (and be considerably easier to implement).

[Tony Docherty]

Dave Tolls wrote:I would provide a link to download it from some simple web app that notes a download, and who.
That will provide as much useful info as anything else (and be considerably easier to implement).

Yes, I agree that's probably a better solution than my suggestions.