My Favourite Feature: The File Fabric Client Ecosystem

My name is Erik, I work as Director of Engineering, Storage Made Easy in the US. I want to share my favorite File Fabric feature with you. Some day’s life gets hectic, and it is not just work I am talking about. As you can use all SME features in a personal account, this post will focus on enterprise deployments.

As an IT department, it is hard to respond to every demand. First the users, there is some combination of “access anywhere”, “BYOD”, “VPN free”, “faster”, “bigger”, etc. Then as a manager your requirements are something like this:

“I want eBay-like web-scale at the cost of a t2.micro ($9.50/month)”, I want SingleSignOn, full auditing, security and all social network features our kids learned and are now teaching us.

If you laughed at the above paragraph, read on.

I spend half my day talking to customers, potential customers, partners and competitors. I know as well as anyone in this industry there is no silver-bullet. No solution solves all problems. You cannot cheat physics. However, the File Fabric comes close to solving our business needs. The way we do this is by building a modular extensible suite of tools that integrate seamless with each other, and at scale act as a large web-scale platform, just as you would expect from a software that can scale for many 100,000’s of users.

Ok, let’s move on, let’s start with the way data is accessed.

Web Access

Much like any other app these days there is a web based client

This is a rich view of the files and features. First pop-quiz: How do I find all files that are tagged with “cat picture”? Joking aside, this tool gives the power to the employee, to track data, collaborate on it, and even annotate files right from the WebGUI.

Native Filesystem Drive

What would the project be without a OS native filesystem client? We have that too, if you want to use it, it is fully customizable, custom installers, white label, at the fingertips of you, the customer. As the admin (technical or security) you can even override features and functionality to create a custom feature list that suites your circumstance. Notice the same filesystem view is available here as it was in the web client.

iPad client

What is a modern app without an iPad client today? Well, we were not sure so here we go. A view of the same folder, easy transition for the users.

There are the same rich features from the iPad, no need to go back to your PC or Mac.

Even native application access, in this screenshot you can see files in the File Fabric storage Cloud directly from MS Word. Can you do that from your windows fileserver?

How about android

We let you use you android for work as well as any other device, we give you a rich user interface where you can interact with your data, read and make comments from other users and of course open and save natively from other tools, like the MS office programs for Android.

What else?

There are more clients, native office toolbar plugins, for Open Office and MS Office, there are clients for the windows phone and even touch optimized client for the Surface tablet.

I hope you can see why this gets me excited, the possibilities are endless, you can serve many of your user communities with our tools, and you can cater to their individual preferences. Maybe someone prefers working on the tablet on the train while commuting, and by providing them easy access, now they actually will, allowing them more flexibility.

Before I go

There is more! The security pieces providing you with authorization control and auditing; the content indexing helps you to find your data; and the workflow alerts ensure that you are notified on updates and comments to files you have shown interest in. I don’t know where to stop, I can go on for hours, but since this post is about the end user tools, I think I should.

Please contact me directly for more information, with questions, or anything else. I hope you tune in to our blog for future posts.

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