How do you add drag-n-drop upload ability from Outlook to a Web form?

Question

I am looking for a way to allow users to upload Outlook emails to a web-based system in a simple manner.

I can get this to work in a manual fashion for the users. They can drag and drop the email from Outlook to their desktop, which creates a .msg file. This works very nicely, esp. if there are attachments in the email which are also stored in the .msg file. This file can then be uploaded using a traditional "input type=file" html field.

I would like to simplify this process, if possible. I have seen some websites that have a drag-n-drop upload feature for files that exist on the hard drive.

However, I am not sure if anything exists that would allow for a straight drag-n-drop from Outlook that could create a .msg file or something similar and handle the file upload. In other words, a solution to cut out the manual step of dragging the email message to the desktop to create the temporary .msg file for upload.

Is this possible, and if so, how? All of the users are currently on Windows XP and have Outlook 2007, IE6 or higher, and Firefox. The backend server is running Java for the application in question (our programming staff uses ASP.NET w/ C# for our web development), though I assume any solution would be largely based upon a client-side technology like Flash or JQuery.

Answer 1

I don't think you'll achieve this with jQuery / JavaScript - you might have a chance with something like Flash.

As an alternative, could you create a simple client application that they can run on their desktop, which allows them to drag the message onto - that way, you can be running in full trust and perform whatever tasks you wish to get the file and upload it from this application (this was the solution used by a file-scanning application I once worked on - we had a small window that users could drag the file or email onto to initiate the upload to the scan store.