Broken CIRCA hyperlinks
Released on 2002-04-09How to share CIRCA hyperlinks correctly?
Most EEA projects now use CIRCA for sharing their working documents with outside partners. In such projects there always is a need to tell the members that certain documents have been made available. This can be achieved through automatic notifications without problems.
However, there is also often need to do that afterwards and refer to the documents manually. The most user friendly way is to copy the hyperlink (URL) of the document metainfo (that red "i") and paste it into a letter or email message. Then the recipient can just click and get to the document. That is almost like an attachment and gives many benefits.
However, an annoyance has been that Microsoft Outlook breaks the long CIRCA hyperlinks at 80 characters. The recipient, who may not be familiar with this funny interaction of Outlook and CIRCA, may not understand how to paste the lines together and gets an error like to one pictured above.
The recommended solution is that the sender should format such email message as HTML instead of RTF that is the default. This is available from Outlook's Format menu, or on a permanent basis, from the Tools -->Options -->Mail format menu.
This is not 100% bulletproof as the recipient's email system may still do tricks to your nice message or they all may not understand HTML, but such systems are becoming increasingly rare.
Also see the frequently asked question on this matter at the NMC site.
