Sharing Outlook OFTs

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
April 15, 2024
2 replies
3928 views

We are trying to share an OFT file via link with a handful of our contacts in Marketo. Has anyone had any success in downloading their OFT file into the Design Studio and then linking the document in their email body? We've noticed the file seems to be corrupted when we send a test email to ourselves.

We are all working in Outlook and planning to send the email to others who are using Outlook, so it is not an issue of having the right program to download the file.

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Jo_Pitts1

Community Advisor

@sierraforsberg ,

OFTs are a native Outlook email format. I'd not be at all surprised if the Marketo Email builder breaks them in some manner (I'd need to see the generated output).

The bigger question, why are you trying to use OFT format? Why not just use an HTML email, and if you want to link to a file, just put a link in there.

Cheers

Jo

sierratoman

Level 2

Hi, not sure if you can see my other response, but I am going to look into HTML as an alternative as well!

SanfordWhiteman

Level 10

“Corrupted” is a bit vague. Marketo doesn’t alter the file after uploading to Design Studio.

In any case, I agree with Jo that this seems like a horrific UX. Everyday end users aren’t used downloading Outlook Templates, it‘ll be a wildly unfamiliar experience. This was what I got in Outlook 2016:

Why don’t you explain what you need in business terms, rather than jumping to a specific technical approach?

sierratoman

Level 2

Our contacts at Microsoft have specific brand guidelines that they require if they are going to help promote co-hosted events. We've been advised that an OFT is the simplest way for them share the content. We prepared an email advising them that the link would be to an OFT file for them to download and share with their contacts, and as Microsoft reps they should be on Outlook.

The content is uploaded as on OFT file but it exists in Marketo as an application/octet-stream and doesn't give an option to open through Outlook.

SanfordWhiteman

Level 10

That’s still the same file, it isn’t corrupted. It just isn’t delivered with a vendor-specific MIME type. (No web server recognizes every single extension and turns it into a specific MIME type, and unknown extensions are treated as generic byte streams.)

I sent myself an (untracked) link to a Design Studio .oft to get the error message posted above. That is, the file was passed to the local Outlook app as expected, and in fact it even opens despite the error message! But Outlook doesn’t trust remote OFTs as templates. So you’ll never get an error-free user experience this way.

You can also steer people to download the OFT from a landing page, like so: Marketo :: OFT download page. This will give them more control over the download/open experience.

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