TheSMESpace Blog

SMEStorage has now been moved to the SMEStorage site and all future blog posts on SMEStorage will be posted there. The blog address is:

http://blog.smestorage.com

The Blackberry mobile version has just entered pre-Alpha status. Most of the API functionality is complete and now it is just a case of building the UI. It should be ready for a mid May release.

This will mean that soon Blackberry owners will be able to view/manage/access their files directly from their device for any of the following clouds:

Amazon S3, Google Docs, RackSpace Cloud Files, Microsoft SkyDrive, Microsoft Live Mesh, Box.net, MobileMe, FTP, Gmail, and WebDav clouds.

You can view a short video of this here.

The below blog post is taken from a recent blog by Roman Gelembjuk which we liked and thought it was worth re-posting here:

I have tested a lot of tool and services to store files online. I chosen SMEStorage.com and use it now. I found most problems of online storage services is the speed of accessing the file. If you need to get some file from your cloud you must:

• Start The browser
• Open the site (ex. smestorage.com)
• Login to the site
• Open the page with the relevant files
• Also, sometimes you must to browse folders and this is a new page/data loading for each folder

What do you do if you have to get 1 file very quick and with a poor Internet connection?

I found a simple solution that works fine with slow connections, and this is a combination of the Linux Drive from SMEStorage.com and Midnight Commander. The Linux Cloud Drive is a  tool that mounts the SMEStorage file system to the local file system (on linux). SMEStorage provides a cloud gateway in which it syncs the file meta-data from different storage clouds but all the files continue to reside on the original storage platform. The Cloud Storage Providers SMEStorage currently supports include Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files, Box.net, MobileME, Microsoft Live SkyDrive, Microsoft Live Mesh, GMail-as-a-Cloud, Email-as-a-Cloud, FTP-as-a-Cloud, and any WebDav enabled cloud.

It is possible to browse many different storage clouds using the SMEStorage Linux Cloud Drive with any filemanager after it is mounted. Usually, linux filemanagers (in different distributions) try to preload some files (documents, images) to create thumbnails . This is fine if the files are stored locally but not good if they are not, because of the time needed to load all the file information from the remote server .

I found an easy solution to prevent this - using Midnight Commander. This filemanager doesn’t load any files . That is why it works very fast with file systems that are not local. So now when i want to get some file very quick from my cloud I Run SMEStorage Linux Drive, mount it and the run Midnight Commander, browse the relevant folder, and get the required file. This is very fast!

Recently Mezeo announced themselves to the market as serious Enterprise Cloud storage provider. We have interacted with the Mezeo team to get an evaluation account so we could validate SMEStorage’s interoperability with Mezeo and we are happy to state that Mezeo works very well with SMEStorage over WebDav.

To use SMEStorage with Mezeo, you need to register for a WebDav Account and also ensure you have an account or an eval account with Mezeo. We worked with an evaluation account to test this and the WebDav endpoint for this is https://eval.mezeo.net. Your authentication details are those that Mezeo provide.

Once  you are setup you can use your Mezeo account with our Windows Cloud Explorer and Windows Tools (which include virtual drive, shell integration and Sync centre), Linux, using the Linux Cloud Drive, and Mac using the Mac Tools, as well as being able to use your account with our iSMEStorage iPhone application.

We have changed some of the features in our Google Docs cloud beta. Google Docs enables you to upload files of any type, but for files it supports, such as office files it can enable you to edit these in Google Docs. To enable this to occur Google converts the document and then if you want it back into a .doc format or something else it enables you to export it. However, formatting can be lost when Google converts such documents as Google does not recognise all word processing formatting. If you just store the documents as a file however then you cannot edit these documents in Google Docs. You are just using it as a storage repository.

As different users want to do different things we have enabled you to have a choice as to how you want to store your documents with Google. You can choose to convert the document when it is loaded to Google or you can choose not to. You can edit the default behaviour from:

My Account->Providers and choose the Google Docs provider.

Here you can choose to change the behaviour as to whether it converts or not. The default is that it does not.

If the document is unconverted you can edit it in Zoho Docs direct from SMEStorage and save it back unconverted to Google Docs. You can do this as many times as you wish. As it is unconverted you cannot edit it in Google Docs however.

If you choose to convert the document on upload then you will be able to edit the document in Google Docs. You will also be able to edit it in Zoho from SMEStorage. There is however one glitch or bug. You can edit it in Zoho from SMEStorage one time only. After this it can be edited in Google Docs but if you download the document from SMEStorage you are unable to open it in MS Office. You are also unable to edit it in Zoho for a second time. You can however choose to export the document to word from the Google Docs web interface and it will open in MS  Office fine. It seems this is a Google Docs API issue for documents saved to Google Docs from Zoho. We are pursuing a workaround to this which we hope to have in place early next week that will remove this issue so that there will be full interoperability between Zoho and Google even if the document is converted. Once resolved we will issue another post.

UPDATE: The above issue is now resolved and you can now have convert on for Google Docs upload and then edit documents with Zoho, and you will then be able to re-edit them in Zoho, edit them in Google Docs, and also download from SMEStorage in the correct format.

The recent release of the iPhone iSMEStorage version 1.02 with its support for video uploads to any cloud has been highly publicised and reported upon and it has been video reviewed on a couple of sites. Below is a video review featured on Vodpod.

We have released the 2nd update of iSMEStorage, the SMEStorage iPhone application to the Apple App Store.

This features:

Updates:

- Ability to disable/enable auto-sizing of font in Settings

- Chunking for large PDF file viewing in local files viewer

- Now able to upload Videos as well as photos for phones with Video capability

- ‘iPhone Photos’ renamed to ‘Media’ in ‘Main Menu’ - Revised link for “Shared by SMEStorage”.

- Quick start guide copied on startup to local files files folder for new users. - Version number now displayed on App About page

Fixes:

- Fixed issue relating to uploads for some clouds that some users have been having.

- Fix to stop large videos crashing in local folders when viewing

- Fixed issue of not removing filter when doing a sync

The Joomla File directory component created by Roman Gelembjuk has been updated after after the LatinhackTeam found an issue with a Local file inclusion vunerability.

The new file is now downloadable from our tools section of the SMEStorage site and from Roman’s site and you should upgrade this if you installed the prior version.

The third beta of our Linux Cloud Drive is now available for download. This version fixes some version issue when launching documents and files directly from the Cloud Drive and then saving them back.

The Linux Drive gives access to the following Clouds as a virtual drive within Linux:

• - Amazon S3
• - RackSpace Cloud Files
• - Google Docs
• - Microsoft Live Mesh
• - Microsoft SkyDrive
• - MobileMe
• - FTP
• - GMail Cloud
• - Email Cloud
• - Any WebDav enabled cloud

A brief demonstration of the drive can be seen in the video below:

12th March 3.34 PM: SMEStorage datacentre outage resolved.