TheSMESpace Blog

We’d like to post a quick thank you to the people using SMEStorage. In the last year we have organically grown to over 10,000 users storing over 1 million files along the way. This is a huge achievement and it of course does not count the number of users who are using smestorage but storing their files on Amazon S3 direct, or Gmail, Box.net, Mosso etc.


We have some great new features and channels planned and also will be doing a lot more work on providing better documentation, including soon, the launch of an online Wiki.


Thanks for supporting us and we look forward to growing stronger over the coming year.

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 are happy to announce today that we now support FTP a a provider in our “Private Cloud package”. This means that if you have access to an FTP director or have your own FTP server you can use this as your Cloud Provider within SMEStorage. Once you have done this you can use our website to upload/download files, and also get access to all our integrations such as Zoho Office, iPaper inline PDF viewing, filters, file sharing, business groups / collaboration etc.


You can also use any of our tooling on top of this such as the iPhone web application, Firefox plug-in, iGoogle widget, Facebook widget, and also our windows tooling with virtual drive, and Microsoft and Open Office integration.


It is easy enough to host your own FTP Server and use cheap commodity storage. Also many users have access to FTP sites they do not use through web site or email subscriptions. Now you can turn them into your own premium cloud storage service !


To get started, first sign up for the Private Cloud package, and then enter your FTP details as below:





Once this has complete you will be asked whether you want to save your information (which is stored encrypted in our Database)





If you want to use your home FTP Server you will probably need to open the ports on your router. A good site to step you through that is here.

We have now integrated some new features into our SMEStorage platform. You can now edit your code directly in the cloud. Any code files that you upload to our supported providers, either S3, Mosso, Box.net, GMail, email-as-a-cloud or evernote can be edited directly by choosing to edit as a document or edit as source.





If you choose the document editing view you can edit your file in a WYSIWIG view as show below:





If you choose to edit as source then you get a source editor and full syntax highlighting for CSS, HTML, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Visual Basic, XML, C, CPP, SQL, Basic and Pascal.

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.

The SMEStorage API has been updated and is now available from Google Code.

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.