ShareDrive - On-Demand files reach your Desktop
By Vivek | May 8th, 2007 at 03:57 pm ET
I think I didn’t do complete justice to ShareDrive when I wrote about ShareMethods earlier in the day. ShareMethods had launched ShareDrive earlier in this month that enables ShareMethods users to access their documents from the WebDAV based on-demand service on their desktop itself.
In some ways ShareDrive might sound similar to Koral’s desktop connector that watches for document updates and acts as a document bin to easily upload documents once you are done. ShareDrive offers a much better solution since it integrates with ShareOffice to let users access their documents from the online service on their desktop without the need to download the files. You can just drag-n-drop files from your desktop into the secure on-demand document repository, that has a familiar model of files and folders. Once documents are on your machine, you can open them via MS Office apps, edit them, and save them directly onto the on-demand document repository.
Utility of this setup comes to forefront when you want to work in offline mode with the documents located on the On-Demand service. To get around that, you can enable one or more folders to synchronized for offline use. Thereafter, any updated documents on the local laptop or desktop or on the server will be automatically synchronized when reconnecting to the network. To get started quicker, you can batch upload your documents at once using the background batch uploads.
Now don’t think this is yet another attempt at On-Demand side of things ’cause ShareMethods has real customers paying real cash. Earlier in this month, ShareMethods signed up few paying customers for the on-demand suite of products including LiteScape Technologies, Pacific_Swimming, and Airspan Networks.
Personally I like the idea of online repository coming to desktop instead of trying to view desktop based files on your laptop and handhelds just ’cause Online Apps are going to be the way of life, not the other way round.
