Many creatives use a variety of services such as WeSendIt, WeTransfer etc to send large files. This is something that is easy to setup with the File Fabric and the best bit is that your company can be in charge of the storage used including how large the file sizes can be, and everything will be audited and logged for data compliance and governance purposes and scanned for PHI/PII information.
Firstly choose from your existing company storage a solution that you wish to use to store the files on. This is the storage that will be used to send or receive files from someone. For this example we will use Amazon S3, which can accommodate extremely large files, but you could use Azure Blob storage or even cheaper storage, such as Google Nearline. Additionally a company could also set this to work against their SMB file shares, either on-premises, or SMB in the cloud, such as Azure Files or Amazon FSx.
Once you have your storage added to the File Fabric we are going to use the File Fabric’s ‘Drop Folder’ feature to both send large files and folder sets to end users as well as provide a link to end users so they can share large files sets.
Activating this is very straight forward. First we are going to create a folder called ‘SendReceive’, that in this case we will storage on Amazon S3, and choose to generate a shared link for the folder:
As we want to enable people to send files we need to check the ‘Allow files to be uploaded’ and as this will be a generic upload box we should also check ‘hide existing files’ so that any files already there cannot be seen.
Now we have our link:
At this point we are theoretically ready to go but lets do one more thing, lets make sure that the storage is capped in terms of what is is uploaded. We can do this using folder quotas:
We will set this to be 1GB although we could set this to be anything we want it to be:
Also note that any large files that are added are added using the File Fabric’s M-Stream file transfer acceleration technology in which files are split into chunks and sent in parallel with no need for a browser plug-in. Below is a screenshot of M-Stream in action:
Now to finish up we will add this to our email signature to make it easy for people being interacted with to send files.
Jon Smith
Pre-Production Asset Manager
Tel: 111-111-111
Send me Files / Password: EasyToUpload!
At this point we are done ! The link in the above is live (at least for now) so feel free to try it out !
In summary we have created a receiving file box utilising commodity cheap storage, in this case Amazon S3, set a quota limit so it can’t get too large and added it to an email signature to make it uber easy for creatives or other business contacts to share files with us.
Of course there is no need to create a link in an email footer and share it out in the way we have but I see so many of these types of links from consumer type services I thought it would be useful to show how the File Fabric could securely replicate this.
If we wanted to extend this in the future we could add a logo and colour scheme it so it reflected a Companies brand and we could choose to receive notifications every time new content was added.
To find out more about the Enterprise File Fabric check out the website.
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