Do you have an interest in understanding how Cloud File Sharing solutions can improve your organization’s operations ?
Over the next 4–8 weeks I’m going to provide you with a series of articles which trace from the ‘early days’ (about 3+ years ago) to today; how the offerings have changed; and how improvements in integration have made cloud file sharing a necessary part of your IT infrastructure.
Here’s some background, to bring you up to speed:
To best understand “cloud file sharing”, I teach my clients that it is simply one more step in the evolution of the Internet. If you go all the way back to a small piece of software which was freely distributed by Novell, you could give your PC the ability to have a familiar looking drive letter in front of your FTP account, irrespective of whether it was actually down the hall or was miles away. Then some friends of mine improved on the idea and created a short-lived software solution named Beeweeb. It was server-based and didn’t require the PC or Mac user to think about the drive name. All the user knew was that when they connected, they had another place to work with their files.
A little while later some equally smart people realized that web servers provided the basic functionality for remote users to work with remote files. After all, the purpose of the web server is to take instructions from a remote user and present him with pages which are located either on the server or can be “fetched” from the webserver. What was missing was a ‘user-friendly’ way for end-users to upload and download files to the webserver. With some effort (yes, good work requires time and testing) the modern WebDAV interface was born.
More, tomorrow….
Source: The RemoteWorkPlace
