Work From Home part 1. Sharing Files
In any office it is pretty much a requirement to be able to move files across different machines. Many companies have several shared network drives and highly organized directory structures to allow data to be easy to find and available for all employees to access. There are dozens of methods to accomplish this in a distributed manner. This post will cover just a few.
Hamachi allows users to create VPN networks with minimal configuration. Simply install Hamachi on all computers to be networked and you are pretty much done. Setting up a VPN has several advantages. For starters it networks the computers which will allow file, print and screen sharing across the machines. This will allow users to map network drives and is also a great way to set up multiplayer games.
Drop Box: While simple file sharing utilities won’t give you as much flexibility as the virtual VPN created with Hamachi, it is a great way to move files from one computer to another very quickly. Dropbox is crazy simple to use and has tons of flexibility for controlling which files get shared and who can see them. For more information about drop box see my previous post on dropbox.
Jungle Disk: Jungle disk is a little less flexible than dropbox but it uses Amazon S3 as the backend. Jungle Disk is primarily for creating mapped network drives based on S3 buckets. The advantage is that you get to use the ridiculously powerful Amazon cloud network. Also for this reason it is a good solution for people who have tons of data to share, if you deal with large images and can see yourself requiring a network drive with 20 - 40 gb of data on it; jungle disk is the way to go. For more details on Jungle Disk see my previous post.
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Hi Nick we have been using SMEStorage for our File sharing and collaboration needs for about 6 months now and I can recommend it fully. There are six of us spread out across the UK who provide graphic design services. We have no central office. We store our files on Amazon S3. We have many thousand of files for customers.
With SMEStorage we setup a business collaboration group for each customer so that they can login and access any files we have put into their business group. They also get notifications by email and/or Twitter when we add new content to their group. You can also do smart things like assign workflow rules that tell you when a type of document is updates or added.
The website allows us and our customers to get access to this data at any time and also it integrates with a number of different sites such as Zoho online office, Picnik for simple graphic editing (which occassionally has been a life saver !) and lots of other stuff, such as viewing PDF’s inline which is handy for our proofs as the client does not need any software installed.
We’ve now also started to use the new windows tooling which provides sync, the same business features of the website and also a virtual drive.
The costs for us doing this ? Nothing ! Right now we are able to use our own account via something called the OpenS3 beta so we’ve used the service for nothing. I am sure this will change but we are happy enough with the service that we are prepared to pay a reasonable fee.