It’s been a while since we looked at file sharing so we thought it was worth revisiting the ways you can share files for multiple Storage clouds via the SMEStorage Gateway:
Email Sharing (Individual files):
When you share a file via email from the web file managers or from the windows tooling then the user will be notified that a file is shared with him in an email from SMEStorage. To access this file the user has to login to SMEStorage so if he does not have an account he will need to create a free account. The reason for this is that this mechanism of sharing lets you assign an expiry time for the link so you can, for example, set the link to expire in two days.
The email branding and email account can be changed to your own organisation if you have a SMEStorage Organisation account.
Email sharing (multiple files)
You can use the cloud clipboard from the Rich File Manager to add files that you want to share. Once you have added all the files you want to share, you can again set expiry links and the email that is sent is done using the SMEStorage branding and the recipient needs to login to SMEStorage or create a free account to access the files.
As above the email branding and email account can be changed to your own organisation if you have a SMEStorage Organisation account.
Sharing via URL
You can get a SMEStorage URL or TinyURL for any file and you can send this to a anyone via email or use in a blog etc. They will not require a SMEStorage account to access the file. This URL does not expire and will only be unusable if you change any details of the file otherwise it will always be able to be used to download the file.
Public Files
You can set a file to be public from the web, windows tools or from the mobile clients. Once a file is made public it is accessible from your public files page which you can find on your sidebar when you login to SMEStorage. You can share the link to your public files page and users do not need to be logged in to access it. All files shared on this page are indexable by search engines and available for anyone to download.
Collaboration Groups
You can setup business Collaboration groups as a mechanism to share files. Once you have setup a group and invited users, any files that you share with the group will automatically generate an email with the file link to all other users in the Group. Other users can also be collaborators and can share files with the group in this way. This is a great way to manage partners for example in which you want them to have the latest updated content and white papers without having to directly email each one.
Mixing and Matching the above way to share files with Encryption
All of the above options can be mixed with file encryption, even when making file public. You could for example, choose to make 1o files public, all of which are encrypted and no-one would be able to download them without the password key that you provide. The same approach works for files shared over email, or via URL or even with collaboration group members.
For example we have a user who wanted to figure out the best way of having his users access file without having to login but without making the file available to any users who came across them. To this end he uploaded his files to Amazon S3 and encrypted them on upload. He shared the public url of the page with his user-base but gave them the key to access the files.
One last note is that we would ask you to please review our Terms of Use before sharing files. Our platform cannot be used for sharing copyrighted content, such as movies, Mp3’s or e-books.
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Today’s Media and Entertainment workflows can depend on multiple storage types and their associated protocols. Assets might be delivered via an AWS S3 bucket, Dropbox share, Azure Blob container, proprietary file acceleration vendor, FTP, SFTP, or a host of other new technologies. Once delivered an asset needs to navigate Hot, Nearline, and Archival storages while being edited, conformed, transcoded, shared, distributed and broadcasted.
