TheSMESpace Blog

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

We are please to announce support for MobileME, iDisk and any WebDav compliant storage cloud from today. WebDAV is the Distributed Authoring and Versioning extension to the standard HTTP/HTTPS web protocol. It allows a client to browse a remote filesystem, usually with a graphical browser that makes it appear that your files are on your desktop. 


This means that anyone who uses these storage clouds with SMEStorage (and remember this does not stop you using them with your normal clients) will get access to our clients:


Web: Rich File Manager,  features integration with best of breed web 2.0 vendors and collaboration features


Windows: Virtual Drive, Shell Integration, Sync Features, Dedicated Explorer, Integration with MS Office & Open Office


iPhone: Web based iPhone client in which files can be viewed, shared, collaborated on, and also viewed offline


Facebook: Share your files on Facebook with your friends


iGoogle: Access your files directly from your iGoogle Portal Page.


Amongst ther storage vendors apart from Apple that support WebDav are Bingo Disk, FilesAnywhere, iDrive.


You can also create WebDav compliant folders in Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems and webdav can also be used to access email systems like Microsoft Exchange and also intranet systems such as Sharepoint.

Today we released our Organisational Cloud Package. This is specifically for businesses who want to take advantage of Cloud Storage.  The Organisational Cloud package supports Amazon S3, Mosso Cloud Files, Box.net, Email-as-a-Cloud, Private Cloud, and GMail-as-a-Cloud.


Specific features are:


- Mix and Match Cloud Providers and view all your files from all providers in one File System





- Use one or more Cloud Providers between as many users as you prefer. We offer 5 and 10 user packages but ask us if you want more than this.


- Administrator can invite and manage users, decide which clouds are used, is responsible for public organisation folders, and can monitor logs.


      


- Use your preferred client - Web, Firefox plug-in, Windows Virtual Drive (with explorer, shell and sync tools), iGoogle, iPhone


- Easily Backup or import from different Cloud Providers, which also includes Google Docs and Evernote.


- Integration with Microsoft Office and Open Office


- All Backups can be scheduled to happen in real-time or offline at a specific time each hour,day,week or month.


- Support automated emails backup using POP3 or IMAP with plug-ins available for Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express.


- Encrypt your files at any time using SHA-1 secure encryption. Only you have the private key so your files can be absolutely secure.


- Incorporate your own Private Organisation Cloud using a simple FTP Server. This can be used to access files in the virtual file system or even backup from private to public cloud or vice-versa.


- Web platform offers integrations with Zoho Office (create documents directly in the cloud), Evernote, Google Docs, Picnik (inline image editing), ScribD (view PDF’s and other documents), and Twitter (file share using Twitter or be notified of users sharing files with you)


- Rich Collaboration, document workflow and file sharing features.


- Ability to edit HTML, PHP, C++, Ruby, Python, .Net, JavaScript and other languages inline using built in code editor in the web platform.





- Sophisticated Filter mechanisms to deal with large volume of files

SMEStorage has integrated with Zoho online office for quite a while now to enable you to edit any documents stored in your Cloud providers directly from a web browser. We enhanced this service recently to enable you to save the documents back from Zoho to SMEStorage after you had finished editing.


Users then started to ask us if they could created new documents to edit with Zoho directly from the web browser. Well now you can. You will see a new icon in your File Manager toolbar which allows you to create a new blank document.

After quite a few user requests we have added Scheduled sychronisation to the SMEStorage platform. You can find this by navigating to My Account ->Scheduler.








These allows you to schedule a synchronisation with any Cloud provider that you use with the SMEStorage platform. This means if you update your Cloud provider with any other tool you can be sure that you have your latest data automatically sync’d with the SMEStorge platform rather than having to do it manually.


If you are using SMEStorage to acces files from an FTP platform or to make emails and attachements available on the cloud, again you can choose to sync this using the sycnrhonisation tool.

We have added a couple of new iPhone information services to our UK iPhone Portal site. These include Amazon Book Search, Top 10 iTunes Music as Video links for YouTube, and real-time update of the latest UK football scores (OK, so we did this one for us ). We created these very easily using Yahoo Pipes. Pipes is a great way to create iphone information services.

THe Firefox plug-in for SMEStorage that is part of the FireUPloader product has been updated.


It now has support for Groups and shared content:





To create a new group click into groups and choose the create new folder icon which will not be used to create a group.


It also now supports encryption:





and also supports file filtering:








To access the Filter icon within the Firefox plug-in you need to be at the root folder. When content is filtered you will see “isfiltered” in the path bar.


And of course you can also choose to fileshare any of your files stored on SMEStorage directly within the plug-in by right clicking on the file and choosing “Send to”.





You can download the new plug-in here.

You have probably noticed that you have had a new graphic on the menu bar within the file manager for a little while now.





This Filter allows you filter your files or folders in one of three ways:





1. By Alpha Index - the first letter of the file or folder
2. By number - you can specify the number of files you wish to view
3. By String - You can choose a name that we will use to look for in the name of the file or the tag and filter on this.


Why is this useful ? Well sometimes you can have some many files that actually managing them can be quite difficult. We also now use this method when you first click on File Manager to load. If you have over 3000 files you will be told that you have a lot of files and asked whether you would like to filter to speed up the loading process.





You can also choose to filter on just files or on backups or groups individually or against all of this together.





We know of some users who have over 30,000 S3 files and so cannot display them all at once and need to be able to filter to be able to display an files at all. Of course the filter works across all the cloud storage providers we support which includes Amazon S3, Mosso Cloud Files, Box.Net, Gmail-as-a-cloud, and email-as-a-cloud.

We have a few goodies coming soon:

1. Adobe Air SMEStorage application

This is currently in Alpha and is being built using our rich API. As it is an Adobe Air application it will run wherever Adobe Air runs which currently is Windows, Mac and Linux. It is faster than the native web version and will have certain offline capabilities.

2. iPhone Native Application

The iPhone native SMEStorage application is in final beta internally. It will support everything the Mobile SMEStorage app supports with some extra goodies such as ability to upload and download photo’s to/from the iPhone library, Flickr support, the ability to store all viewed files offline, a voice recorder, and also an internal web server to put files straight on the phone.

   


  


Of course both apps work with all the providers we support which include Amazon S3, Mosso Cloud Files, Box.net, Email-as-a-Cloud, GMail-as-a-Cloud and Evernote, all of which can be used individually or together to form virtual cloud storage.