Background I am a member of a society that uses Sugarsync's Magic Briefcase to keep all of our documents synchronised in near-real-time on each of our computers. In essence, the Magic Briefcase is a monitored folder on each PC, and any changes within it are silently replicated via Sugarsync's servers to the equivalent folder for everyone else. It works a treat and we can even access the documents via smartphone apps and web browser.
Question I'm stumped with something that I thought would be easy-peasy - and perhaps is if I can learn the necessary trick: Sending a hyperlink in an e-mail which when clicked will directly open the target document in the Magic Briefcase on the User's own PC.
This is what I have done so far:
- Recognised that each member will need to set up an environment variable since the Magic Briefcase will exist inside an inconsistent directory structure; as a minimum the PC Username will be different each time
- Created an environment variable called MB with value C: \Users\TLXV105\Documents\Magic Briefcase. Note that the gap between C: and \ is to stop the syntax being treated as an emoticon on this website and becoming "C
", that's all.
- Tested that the environment variable works by typing the following in the Windows Explorer navigation field: %MB%\subfolder_name\test_document.doc. Bingo - test_document.doc opens in MS Word
- If I paste the above URL in an e-mail hyperlink though and then send it to myself, it doesn't work because it has become scrambled. It doesn't matter what e-mail client I send and receive from (Outlook 2010, Thunderbird, and Yahoo web) or if I double quote the URL; it gets scrambled: %22%MB%%5Csubfolder_name%5Ctest_document.doc%22
How to solve this please?
It'd be a neat refinement to be able to send a link for each member to open a document on their own PC
Cheers!
TLXV