ShareDrive Launch at Red Herring Spring 2007
Last week, I participated in the Red Herring Spring 2007 conference in Monterey, California. It was a great event covering a diversity of topics of interest including alternative energy, digital media, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). I spoke at a keynote roundtable session moderated by Scott Martin, Senior Editor at the Red Herring, with CEOs from BlueLithim and Wikia and two venture capitalists. Topics covered included Office 2.0, the evolution of online video advertising, and what’s next for user generated content. Conversations were pretty interesting and touched also on Web 3.0, evolution of Enterprise search and workflow, etc. I also had a chance to catch up with digital media colleagues from my past life at Apple Computer (Ty Roberts, now CTO at Gracenote and Casey King CTO of LifeSize Communications) and had a reminder of just how nice it is in Monterey Bay…
In addition to the panel, ShareMethods made a key product announcement for ShareDrive OnDemand which was covered by InternetNews.com. ShareDrive OnDemand solves some pretty key issues with on-demand document services, which typically are not integrated with a user’s desktop experience and can become inaccessible during major internet outages. ShareDrive OnDemand addresses these limitations via support for desktop integration (i.e., drag and drop of documents, batch upload, batch download), offline synchronization (download latest documents before jumping on a plane, and then automatically synchronizing any changed documents back to the online service while downloading updates too), and local backup to a server or laptop for documents “in the cloud”.
One of our customers - LiteScape Technologies - who also announced their use of our solution for a global deployment to hundreds of users to support document sharing and communications with their partners such as AT&T, Microsoft, WebEx, Cisco, and IBM, among others - is a user of ShareDrive OnDemand and is using the solution to ensure a local and scheduled backup of all of their online documents. We also announced a global deployment of 450 users at Airspan Networks and our deployment for a non-profit organization (Pacific Swimming) via our ShareAction program.
ShareDrive is a subscription service ($5 per user per month) when a customer downloads a small applet to provide offline support and rich desktop integration. Its free when it is used in conjunction with the operating system and that is called ShareDrive Lite. This magic can all happen easily because the foundation of ShareDrive OnDemand is based on one of the open Internet standards that comprise OpenSAM (see next blog post…) - webDAV. Let us know if you are interested in ShareDrive OnDemand and we will get you setup pronto…
