SMEStorage Blog

We’ve just released the SMEStorage Google Android Application to the Android Market place. It offers similar functionality to our iPhone Application. in particular:

- Manage and work with: Google Docs, SkyDrive, Amazon S3, RackSpace Cloud Files, MobileMe, Mezeo Personal Cloud Storage, FTP, WebDav, Box.net, SkyDrive and Live Mesh. If you work with more than one cloud then you can see all your cloud files in one virtual view.

- Sync Files: Directly to and from your phone

- Create Notes: And sync back to your underlying cloud

- Share files: Via Email, Twitter and by getting a TinyURL copied to the Android clipboard

- Collaborate: Manage and create business collaboration groups direct from your phone

- Cloud Sync: Sync the meta data in your underlying clouds so that your file view is always up-to-date

- Change Cloud Providers: If you are working with more than one cloud file on your device then you can change your primary cloud provider direct from the device.

- Local View: Files that are viewed are stored locally and be viewed from a local file manager direct on the device.

- Use Filebox: To email files directly to your device. More on this here

You can find out more on these features and more watching the video overview below:

Those users who use the full version of our Windows tools will be familiar with our Sync Tools in which you can Sync your desktop data with that in the clouds. We are now almost ready to release the same functionality for Linux to compliment the ongoing beta of our Linux Virtual Drive.

This functionality means thatYou can work locally with files on your Linux desktop and be secure in the knowledge that they will be sync’d back to the Cloud and available, whatever that cloud is.

For companies whose user-base is heterogeneous, from an OS standpoint, it means that the Linux user is not the poor relation, he has the same Cloud tools and functionality as his Windows counterpart.

The Linux Sync tools will work with Google Docs, Microsoft SkyDrive, Mezeo personal cloud storage, Microsoft Live Mesh, Apple MobileMe, Amazon S3, RackSpace Cloud Files, Box.net, WebDav, FTP Clouds, GMail (GDrive), Email Clouds, and also, soon DropBox.

You can expect to see the Linux Sync tools on our Labs page sometime next week.

We’ve just uploaded a new build of our Mac OSX Cloud Drive. This fixes a bug in Internationalisation where the drive would have issues when being ran on an OSX implementation that was not native English. The new build number is now 0.971b.

We had a DNS issue for the last two hours which resulted in the site being unavailable. This was due to a corrupted DNS appliance which as been replaced. All is normal now and we apologise for any inconvenience.

One of the things we have been working on is enabling WebDav across the SMEStorage Cloud Gateway platform. This would mean that any Cloud Storage Provider we support would then be available to be used via WebDav even if the underlying cloud provider did not support it. We’ve now finished this work and we’ve made this available to be purchased as an add-on from the Cloud Add-On’s page which is available in every users sidebar after login.

This feature is ideal if you use iPhone / iPad and other phone applications that offer WebDav integration but don’t support application such as SkyDrive or Amazon S3. If you use our iSMEStorage Application you can open files into these apps but there has been no way to save them back out to the cloud until now as many apps are silo’d in that they don’t offer you the ability to open the files back into iSMEStorage.

WebDav can also be useful when you are blocked from installing third party software on your OS but still want to access your cloud files. We support the ability to do this on Windows and LInux with our WebDav integration but not the Mac OS. The Mac OS WebDav support is not great and you should use the iSMEStorage Virtual Drive for the Mac if you wish to access your Cloud files from the Mac OS.

Watch the video below to see the popular Office HD app being used with SMEStorage CloudDav to open, edit and save files on Microsoft SkyDrive and Amazon S3.

We’ve disabled the RSS for files the weekend as we are doing some work on this. This will affect user who share their public files via RSS and also users who use our WordPress plug-In for sharing files on the sidebar. It should be back online by the end of day Monday GMT.

We’ve rolled out a feature update in the SMEStorage Gateway platform today that enables our individual users and also companies using our Organisation Cloud to bring email data and attachments closer to their storage clouds.

For individuals one of the frustrations of managing data is making sure you have it where you want it, being able to share and the ability store it with other pertinent information. Sometimes email is the right way of doing this, but in many cases it is not.

Organisations have different challenges. Having emails in inboxes appertaining to Marketing, or Hunan Resources, or clients is fine, but it’s easy for this to be ‘lost’ in some users inbox and not available to the whole department. FileBox changes this because it allocates a unique email to each Organisation Folder is created and each user of the Organisation Cloud can send or CC an email to this folder and the email will be stored as a text along with any attachments so that it is instantly stored in the correct place and available to all Organisation users.

The way this works is as follows:

1. Users have an extra setting in their My Account-> Options page which appertains to Filebox

2. The user is given the option of assigning a keyword to the filebox@SMEStorage.com email address so that the end email address become filebox.<keyword>@smestorage.com.

3. This is your unique address to send or forward an email. All emails that are received to this address that are sent from your registered SMEStorage email address will be added to a folder called “My Filebox”

4. You can choose whether just to store emails or emails and attachments.

5. Within the Filebox folder the subject line of the email will become a folder name and within this will be stored the email, as a text file, and any attachments if this is the configuration you chose.

Organisation Admins get some extra features from the ‘Org Folders’ sidebar options. Here Admins can also choose the keywords for the Organisation Folders they have created so that email information and attachments can be sent directly to this folder. As with the Individual use, the subject line becomes the folder name. In the example below we have four Org folders, two of which are mapped to Amazon S3 and two of which are mapped to Google Docs.

Folders can be mapped to different to storage clouds so ultimately your data will end up storage on the storage cloud of your choice.

From today, using your own Amazon S3 keys is not free ! Previously the only way to use Amazon S3 with SMEStorage was to sign up for the Individual Lifetime Cloud package which gives you access to up to 10 storage clouds in one virtual view, and also our comprehensive windows tools.

Amazon S3 includes support for buckets from all regions and also supports visual RRS and RRS conversion as well as managed file encryption, and the integration with services such as Zoho and Picnik for in-browser document  and image editing. We also provide a free Windows Cloud Dashboard to work with your files. Unlike other Amazon S3 tools our aim is to present a business overlay on top of Amazon S3 rather than a complete tech view that other tools and providers support.

We’ve just updated our Labs page with the beta 4 of our Mac Drive. This is a huge step forward in our goal of having a robust multi-cloud drive for the Mac OSX. We now have implemented a cache to keep Finder happy when files are first copied or dropped there, and we add them to a queue so that they are uploaded in the background. If you shut down then the files resume next time you fire up the laptop and the drive is mounted

We also catch queueing operations so we can deal with renames and deletes, and we also now support the opening of encrypted files as well as letting you get a URL for a file using Finder Service actions. You can watch the video below to get more of a feel for what the drive does.

Mac Cloud Drive Beta 4 for Google Docs, S3, SkyDrive other Clouds

One of the things we get asked about a lot is Sync, especially for the WIndows platform, and especially for Google Docs and Amazon S3. Our Sync tools, Cloud Dashboard, Virtual Drive, shell integration etc, work above any cloud that is mapped to the SMEStorage platform. If you have a multi-cloud account and have 10 clouds mapped to our gateway then you will see 10 cloud directories from each of the different storage providers.

You can set your primary cloud for any sync directly from the Cloud Dashboard tools and and any files you nominate for sync will be sync’d with the underlying cloud. We prepared a small video that you can see below that will show you further details on how this works.

As more and more SMB’s and Organisations move to cloud they want a way to work with their files which is intuitive to the way they worked in the past. They also want ways to keep certain files in sync. For example doc files with Google Docs, maybe video or music files with Amazon S3 etc. This is the aim of our cloud desktop tools. To enable the user to have a more natural user experience and tie the desktop to the cloud environment, but in a more intuitive way, whilst at the same time layering on business features that are useful and productive to the user.