TheSMESpace Blog

As a Cloud vendor, one of the most repetitive things we get asked is about Security, and this is often followed by “where are my documents stored” ? Rapidly followed by a soliloquy  of questions relating to this, i.e. “How can I prove what country I was in when I signed and uploaded them” “Where where they actually deposited” etc.

These are fair questions, and we don’t pretend to be experts in legislation for document storage which can vary depending on the Industry. What we can do however is try to make our platform easier for you to get these answers. To that end we have added integration with a GEO Location Service for all files that are uploaded. Using a GEO Location service enables us to figure out where you were when you uploaded a document and to what endpoint the document was sent to. We can then store this information with each file.

To access this information all you have to do from the File Manager is click “Show File Info”.  There is an example screenshot of this below:

You can see from this Screenshot where the file was uploaded from, and where it was uploaded to, down to the town, country and Country with detailed latitude and longitude. You can also see which Cloud. In the screenshot above this is stored on the SMEStorage Cloud which is underpinned by Amazon S3.

This service works across all 10 clouds that we currently support, if you upload your files to your cloud via SMStorage. If you upload them direct with your Cloud Provider then we will still have some file meta-information but there will be no GEO information.

Note that your file may not end up being stored at the endpoint in which the file is accepted, but you can prove the location at which the file was uploaded and accepted, and with vendors such as Amazon you can choose which region your file storage is restricted too.

The SMEStorage iPhone Application, iSMEStorage has been approved by Apple and is in the App store. As per our previous blog post you can see a video on the functionality of iSMEStorage below, and you can purchase the App directly from here.

We continue to work on the Mac Virtual Drive. We know that we are a little behind on this as to when we wanted to release it but you have probably seen from many of the recent blog posts that we have been working on a lot of things in Parallel !

We hope to be in a position to release the first beta towards the end of next week on our site, so keep checking back for this. It will be on our labs page.

In the meantime there are some screenshots below to show progress:

We’ve finally submitted the SMEStorage iPhone application to the Apple App’ Store. We now have a period to see if it is accepted or rejected. It is not unusual for apps to get rejected so we have our fingers crossed ! In the meantime you can have a sneak preview of the application from the video below:

For many of use in the office using Mac’s we’ve yearned for some tighter integration with SMEStorage and the Mac. You can choose to use the Windows explorer via Crossover or WINE with the Mac and it works nicely, and you can also use the Firefox plug-in which also works really well, but having OS level integration is always nice.


Snow Leopard has enhanced the integration of the automator services into the OS which makes it much easier to provide contextual functionality.


Using this method there is now available an add-in for users of SMEStorage to be able to upload their files directly from the Mac to their chosen cloud of choice (and we now support over 10 storage clouds), and after the file has been uploaded a unique link for the file will be copied to the clipboard.


You can view a video below that show this working with Google Docs:

We’ve released the third beta of our Linux Drive. You can find this on our labs page. The Linux drive enables you to access your Cloud Storage files directly from Linux. How does it work ? Simple:


1. Register for an account with SMEStorage and sync the cloud storage vendor(s) of your choice, be it Google Docs, Amazon S3, Microsoft SkyDrive, Microsoft Live Mesh, GMail Files, FTP files, Box.net, Apple MobileMe, Email files, or any WebDav Cloud. Remember depending on the account you choose you can map multiple storage vendors to one account.


2. Sync your file meta data via the smestorage gateway


3. Install the Linux Cloud Drive, and voila ! You can access your files directly from a drive from you Linux desktop.


Have a look at the video below to see how easy this is:

The SMEStorage multi cloud platform now supports Google Docs as a Storage Cloud. This means you can take advantage of SMEStorage clients, tools, and additional services that are enabled when you sync your Google Docs Cloud with the SMEStorage Platform via the SMEStorage gateway. This includes

and there many features in the platform which are added including encrypion of files, RSS documents feeds and more.


We have put together a short video that shows some of the features and clients of SMEStorage working with Google docs below. After clicking play, wait 5 or 6 seconds for the video to buffer the stream:

Recently we pushed out some WordPress plug-ins that enable you to backup your wordpress blog to any of the 10+ storage clouds we support, and a separate plug-in to enable you to share your cloud storage files easily from your blog via file links.


There are now two Joomla components created by Roman Gelembjuk. One mimics the WordPress component which easily enables you to share your Cloud Storage files on your Joomla site, and the second is a rich component that displays a file directory and enables you to easily manage and share files within the directory that are hosted on your choice of cloud storage. Below is an example of this directory. You can see this for yourself here.





SMEStorage File Directory download
SMEStorage File Share Download


Storage Clouds supported are Amazon S3, RackSpace Cloud Files, Google Docs, Box.net, Microsoft Live Mesh, Microsoft SkyDrive, Box.net, Apple MobileMe, GMail, Email Clouds, FTP, and any WebDav enabled Cloud.

We have released .Net API for SMEStorage and can be downloaded from google code. The multi cloud API provides a single .Net interface to access over 10 cloud providers including Amazon S3, Microsoft SkyDrive, RackSpace Cloud Files, Mobile Me, Box.net + more.


The package also includes a complete sample application and comprehensive documentation. You can download the Microsoft help file from here. Now we provide API libraries for Perl, PHP, ruby, .Net and REST. We soon will be releasing an Objective-C library

This is our first post of the new year and in the period between December and February we have been very busy indeed. The SMEStorage web platform has been given a total new look and feel and many new features have been added. We’ve also added support for Microsoft SkyDrive, Microsoft Live Mesh and Google Docs storage clouds.


Our focus is on providing as support for as many commercial storage clouds as possible and enabling you to combine these clouds into a virtual view and providing enhanced features and services on top of the clouds we support. The picture below gives a good overview of the SMEStorage.com platform.





We’ve also put together a video to highlight some of the features and services that are visible to users of clouds that we support via the SMEStorage platform below. Click play and then wait 4 to 5 seconds for the video to load. It is best viewed in full screen: