Saving E-Mails into a Silverlight Application

Question

We have an Silverlight applications for tracking Sales Leads. In this application files can be attached to the Sales Leads using the File Open dialog and a file upload module. This works great.

In a perfect world, the client wants to be able to drag and drop e-mails onto the lead in the silverlight application. I know that this is a stretch.

I am looking for ingenious ways of getting e-mails from Outlook attached to Leads in our database.

Our best idea to date is to forward the e-mails to a monitored mailbox with the Lead # as part of the subject. A batch program would convert the e-mail into a PDF and save the PDF and file attachments in the lead specific folder. This feels a little kludgy because the Lead # is not currently exposed to the customer and requires non-techie users to follow instructions.

Please let me know if you have any better ideas.

Thanks, Mike

Answer 1

Actually, with Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 you should be able to code a Silverlight app to accept a drag-drop straight from Outlook. Tim Heuer has a good article about it here. All you would need is to add a drop target area to the Silverlight app, users would navigate to the correct lead in the app, then drag emails straight from their Outlook to the Silverlight app.

Corrected: That was v4, which is still beta.