PDFs, Videos and Presentations, Oh My…

by Danny Kolke
published on: 07/01/08 9:29:06 AM

We announced Etelos Share™ beta, a service for businesses to share data between their users in a secure way. This service is really quite simple and, in all actuality, we have been providing the basics of this service for years.

Why Are You Doing Sharing?

Our customers have files they want to share in a secure way. We have thousands of accounts/businesses that use other Web apps and services that are enablers of collaboration like Google Docs, etc. but lack the simple ability to share files that are not in supported formats. 

Why not use Google Docs or something similar? Well, it seems that PDFs, video presentations, sensitive files, large presentations and other formats don't seem to import well into these services. If you want to keep your stuff in one place, Etelos Share just makes sense. (In my experience, editing complexly formatted Microsoft Word docs with attorneys might be a good example of a doc that has problems importing into Google Docs for editing.)

How Does it Work?

A Web app in its simplest form is files and data, stored in a secure place that the admins for the account can access (at least in our architecture). All we did was take our user management interface and expose the ability to easily add users to a Share. The protocol for sharing files is nothing fancy, just reliable SSL and webdav. Accessing a drive via webdav is easy. You can get many online utilities that take advantage of these technologies, we just made it easy to create users and multiple drives.

The key to the Etelos model is what an account is. When we install a Web app for a user, we actually create an account (synonymous with a business unit) and an account framework. Inside this account framework, we install applications, create users and grant access for those users to be able to do things. Etelos Share beta is a simple app, it's the user management interface that makes it easy to use.

In the image above, you can see in this easy-to-use interface that the users can be grouped and managed. Green dots on the interface shows that the user has access to the app selected. You can add multiple shares, and select who is, or who is not in each share.

Once mounted, a user can upload files, folders and more. In the image above, you can see a folder with several documents in them uploaded to a share.

Simple to Understand & Simple to Use

The Etelos Share beta is a simple to understand use of the Web, and even more simple to use for any size company. Check out the demo videos to see how it works then go ahead and give it a try.