I came across and interesting article this morning. A Japanese company called TechFirm [JP] has just released a special Twitter client for the iPad in the App Store. “Breath Bird” lets handicapped users tweet with their breath. Interesting, right? People who can’t use their fingers can still engage in the Twitter universe by simply breathing into the iPad’s mic.

How many times per day do you have to remember your user name and password for a particular application? I just took a few minutes to recall my morning and I’ve already logged into six different applications- all of which, I have stored in my head. But there are so many times per day that I need to log in to do something quickly in a particular application and I cannot, for the life of me, remember the correct password for that particular application. Frustrating!

OneLogin is a useful tool for small businesses to unify access to SaaS apps. OneLogin eliminates user-managed passwords and ensures users only have to remember and enter one single password- for OneLogin or their corporate network. It’s simple- one click. This eliminates the need to remember different user names and passwords for various applications.

Being new to the ShareFile team, I was very interested in the reports ShareFile has to offer. One of the features that I have not heard a lot of customers talk about is reporting so I thought it would be a great topic to write about.

ShareFile has robust reporting that can help your business save time, manage usage, and even help with Sarbanes-Oxley compliancy.

Once logged in, click on “Admin” in top right navigation bar, then click on “Reporting” in right navigation. This will take you to your Account Reporting Dashboard. You can see a high level view of your users, clients, storage space, and bandwidth usage.

Under “Details” click “+Create Report”

Report Number 5 – Usage Report. Check employee or client activity. This is also a great customer service tool. You can check to see which clients have downloaded, or not downloaded, the file you sent. If it has been several days and the file has not been downloaded, you can contact them to see if they need assistance. It is a great reminder to download the file and your client will appreciate the attention to detail. Usage reports can also be helpful audit tools. Have you ever had a client say that they didn’t receive information that you thought that they had, or wanted to double-check when a team member last updated a file? The Usage Report gives you facts such as the exact time and IP address where an upload or download took place to help answer any questions that may come up as a natural result of collaboration.

Last night, our ShareFile Development team pushed a new update live allowing for multi-level administration within ShareFile accounts. Multi-level administration is a concept and feature set that is built for companies that want to delegate and/or separate administrative function for employee users. The previous setting of “Admin” included a tremendous amount of functionality that was not always desirable for all administrative type users. For example, some users may only need to access billing while others should only be able to see the information but not edit preferences.

When creating new employees or editing current employees, you will be given a list of administrative options that can be enabled or disabled for a particular user. This page can be seen below:

More information about these permissions and how to update administrative options for your employees can be found through our Knowledge Base here.

If there are any questions or issues, please contact your Account Manager or our Support staff.

Here at ShareFile, our Development team has been busy at work over the past month releasing a number of small updates for the web application and Desktop Sync tools. These updates include distribution group changes, versioning updates and improved progress bars within the Sync interface.

Within the web application, our Development team made a distribution group upgrade, which will allow empty distribution groups to be added to folders. This is a great update in that it now allows users to create a Distribution Group, set the permissions for that group to certain folders and add the client users to that group as necessary automatically populating their permissions within the folder. More information about our Distribution Groups can be found here.

We also made an update to our File Versioning feature so that listings of file versions will show the date and time for when a specific file was uploaded. Hopefully, this will be helpful for accounts with files that are updated multiple times in the same day. This was automatically updated for all accounts. More information about versioning can be found here.

Finally, our Desktop Sync tool was updated to version 1.2.3, which features improved progress bars for tracking progress in the Sync interface while jobs are running. To learn more about our Sync tool or to download the latest version, please click here.

This month our Development team also released some smaller updates internally, which laid the groundwork for some big security enhancements coming soon. If there are any new upgrades or suggestions to increase usability, please contact us or send an email to suggestions@sharefile.com.

Ever heard of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)? Interesting concept in today’s fast paced environment. Mobile solutions like smartphones and tablets are quickly moving into the workplace. Such trends as BYOD are becoming more prominent in work policies. As a society, we seek to gather the most amount of information in the shortest amount of time. Smartphones and tablets allow us to do just that. Simply take a look around your office, the mall, or even the doctor’s office and a majority of the crowd is soaking up all the latest information via social media from their device of choice. Such devices are also convenient when traveling on business trips like conferences and other events- carrying an iPad is easier than a notebook.

How often do you see the email error on an important document, indicating the file you are trying to attach is too large? Or what your email box is too full and you must delete items before you can send?

Annoying, right? According to a recent article in Network World, this happens often with businesses. Unfortunately, some businesses have no idea that there are solutions out there to prevent this type of frustration. Businesses usually try to work around this inconvenience by breaking up files into multiple, smaller files. Another common method of file transfer is putting the needed file on a thumb drive and taking it or sending to the intended recipient. Or those that are brave may even try setting up their own FTP server, which may or may not be secure.

Throughout the month, our Development team continuously releases updates to our application to allow for increased ease of use for our ShareFile users. This month, we have made a number of enhancements within our ShareFile application to help make it easier for Administrators to manage their accounts. These enhancements include a new folder invitation beta feature, an update to the “Remember Me” check box on the login screen and the ability to create new account settings, including the limitation of file versions, creation of case-sensitive passwords and the limitation of IP addresses.

With ShareFile’s new folder invitation feature, folder administrators will be able to send a link granting full folder access to as many email recipients as they would like without having to set the users up with folder access first. This feature is designed to make it easier for folder administrators to grant access to folders to a large group of users. These invitations will allow interested parties to sign up for gain access to folders within a ShareFile account. At the same time, we have also made updates to the “Remember Me” check box on the Login screen of a ShareFile account. Now, the check box reads “Keep me logged in,” as opposed to “Remember Me;” by selecting this option, the ShareFile account will save the email address and password of the user so that it will be automatically filled in whenever you login using the same browser on your computer. For any new accounts opened on the 16th of May or after, the box will read “Remember Me,” but this box will only save the user’s email address, and not their password. This update is designed to improve security within an account because the user must enter their ShareFile password each time they login.

Accounts created prior to the 16th of May can also have this setting updated by contacting our Support team at support@sharefile.com. Finally, this month, our Development teams made a number of new account settings available, including the ability to limit file versions, create case-sensitive passwords and limit IP addresses. In limiting file versions, administrators can change the number of copies of a file that will be saved as separate versions on a folder. Case-sensitive passwords can also be enforced on an account-wide basis and accounts may now also limit account activity to a given number of IP addresses. This allows accounts to limit file access and to discourage distribution to external users. To change both the password settings in your account or to limit the IP addresses accessing your account, please contact ShareFile Support at support@sharefile.com.