Online Storage
SkyDrive Explorer integrates SkyDrive As A Network Drive
In my previous articles, I’ve listed of ways to get the best use out of Windows Live SkyDrive. This has consistently been one of the most read posts on my blog especially around using Gladinet to set up Live SkyDrive as a network drive on your computer.
Recently, a new product has come into Beta, that allows for the same level of functionality and allows the user to set up their SkyDrive account as a network drive without going through extended configuration steps that Gladinet takes us through.
In all fairness, connecting via Gladinet offers many more options such as connecting to other types of cloud storage at the same time (for example, Google Picasa, Amazon S3 and Google Docs). SkyDrive Explorer only connects you to Live SkyDrive.
SkyDrive Explorer is a free product and is easy to use. It requires little to no configuration and allows the user to use their SkyDrive just like any other folder on their computer….
How to Install SkyDrive as a Network Drive via Gladinet (updated)
Recently I created a post (turned out to be one of the most popular on this site) to show how to install Live SkyDrive as a Network Drive using Gladinet.
At that time, Gladinet was still a Beta Program. Recently, they released Version 1 and there has been some significant changes to the instructions. I’ve now updated the post to properly reflect these changes.
I’m now using the free edition of Gladinet to connect to my SkyDrive, Google Apps and Google Picasa albums all via My Computer
You can find the article here: Set Up Live SkyDrive as a Network Drive via Gladinet
Hope this helps everyone!
11 Free Services for Online Storage, Sharing & Collaboration
Storage has come a long way from the good old days of keeping data on floppy discs and DVD’s. Its advanced to external hard drives and storage media such as iPods and SD Cards and so on. These forms of data storage are very common nowadays.
All these are good methods to carry information with you as you go however they have a few disadvantages. They are physical devices prone to accidents and subject to demands of physical transportation. They can be lost or stolen and can end up placing information into unauthorized hands. They may also require special drivers or slots installed on the machines before the information can be seen. Collaboration and versioning can be difficult unless if additional transportation methods are implemented.
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The alternative to carrying physical storage devices with you is to store the information in a secure online facilities. Depending on the online facility, this can have the following advantages:
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Its accessible everywhere as long as you have access to the internet.
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It is safe and secure (provided the online facility has good authentication and authorization practice).
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It may be possible to edit your documents online directly on the online facility’s site. Alternatively, some facilities offer offline editing with automatic synchronization back to the online document.
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It is possible to share documents with selected or public audience.
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Some online facilities provide for collaborative editing of document.
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Lastly, its possible to keep physical stores synchronized across multiple devices
Here are a few applications and services that can provide for online document storage, collaboration and remote synchronization:
Live SkyDrive – How To Set Up As Network Drive via Gladinet
Updated: 3rd June 2009 – to cater for Gladinet moving out of Beta and changed instructions to use the free version with updated screenshots and instructions.
Recently I talked about Windows Live SkyDrive, a facility that allows you up to 25gigs of storage space for free. The storage space is available anywhere and while its an excellent facility, it can get cumbersome dealing with uploading files and working through the web based interface.
Ideally, you want to have a folder structure set up on your computer so that you can just navigate through your SkyDrive just like you do any of your other hard drives. Gladinet is a cloud based service that does just that. It brings online applications and storage to your local machine.
Gladinet is a fully featured service that allows for (amongst others):
- Drive “mounting” (act of setting up an online storage like SkyDrive or Picasa or Google Docs as local hard drives)
- A Cloud based desktop that enables users to use online applications to work on local files.
- Task schedulers to cater for scheduled transfers of data (eg as backup)
- Smart file transfers that allows for encryption, compression and reliability.
- It allows you to upload images without resizing!! (If you use the web interface to upload images, they get resized automatically – this way it treats image files as data, so SkyDrive doesn’t resize or constrain the image in any way).
What we will do today is use Gladinet to “mount” our SkyDrive so that it is available on My Computer.
Zoho Mail – How to add a new mail account to Zoho Mail
Welcome to Part II of my Zoho articles. (Part I here). This drills down further into one of the Zoho applications (namely Zoho Mail) and gives you some guidance around setting up Zoho Mail as your primary mail application.
Zoho Mail by default gives you a @zoho email address (yes, yet another email address), which I’m not too keen on as i have many already. Instead I wanted to add my Newbtech and Gmail mail accounts so that i can access them via Zoho Mail.
Most broadband providers have an online offering in terms of allowing you to access and create mail from the web without having to use large windows/linux based clients such as Microsoft Outlook. However, if you’re anything like me, you may most likely have quite a few of these accounts and Zoho mail allows the user to maintain all these accounts within one application.
Zoho Mail is a fully featured mail application with facilities to attach documents from your local drive through to Google Docs. It supports folders, labels and other functionality commonly found in Microsoft Outlook for instance.
Windows Live Writer 2009 – Installing on Windows Server 2003
I’m now starting to use offline blogging software to write some of my posts. I had a look at a couple of offline blogger applications to see which one suited my needs best. The two that looked most promising were Windows Live Writer and Zoundry Raven. Both has had an excellent feedback recently especially when blogging to engines such as Blogger and Wordpress.
While I had the latest version of both installed at home, I had a major issue installing Windows Live Writer at work. I run Windows Server 2003 on my desktop at work and the installer for Windows Live simply refused to work on it.
After a bit of research, i found that it was only the installer that had the issue and I could install Windows Live Writer via the .msi. In the end, I found the .msi file in my temp folder on my Vista machine at home. (I also found an .msi on the net, but that was for either Dutch or an older version). This one is for Windows Live Writer 2009
For others who are running Windows Server 2003 and the installer complaining, I’ve uploaded the .msi file to my Skydrive. You can download it from here:
NOTE: This is the 32 bit version!
If you need any other MSI’s (eg, Live Messenger, etc), please leave a comment or send me an email.
I’d appreciate a comment if this helps you in any way :)
Zoho Personal – Online Office Suite. An Overview
For many years, the only way to work with a full suite of productivity tools was to purchase/download and install Microsoft Office or Open Office onto your machines. Documents were created and stored locally and shared via Email or Shared folders, etc.
With the Internet fast becoming the medium of choice for storage and collaboration, there has been many products being developed and trying to take a share of this market. I’ve recently test driven applications such as GBridge for desktop sharing and collaboration and Adobe Buzzword for document authoring and collaboration. These are specialized in doing one thing well. And they do.
Adobe Buzzword Beta
Recently i looked at Microsoft SkyDrive as online storage mechanism and actively use Google Docs to hold a lot of my documents. Adobe is coming out with a similar offering in terms of online document storage and collaboration.
Main Features
- Its an online word processor
- It allows you to store and access your documents from anywhere (internet access permitting)
- Its got an excellent collaboration functionality – allows multiple authors to make changes to the same document
- Key to any collaboration tool is tracking changes, versioning and reviewing edits. It comes with an tools to do all these things.
- Ability to add comments to the document inline as well as controlling access to documents/functions through roles.
- It supports image imbedding and formatting words around these images.
Right.. so lets take this for a quick test drive…
Windows Live SkyDrive – 25 gigs of space for free!
One of the more popular online storage providers out there currently is Google with their GoogleDocs application. This is a pretty cool application that allows you to upload and share all manner of documents.
Microsoft has done it one better with their latest offering called Microsoft Skydrive. Similar in concept, it’s one of the services provided by Windows Live that gives you your very own online drive where you can store just about anything.
More impressively, the space you are allowed to store is a mind boggling 25gigs! Thats a whole lot of space :)
So what would you store in these 25 gigs? Here is an idea.. practically everyone out there now has a digital camera of their own (my four year old has her very own.. in pink). And how many people out there keep back ups of their photos? I bet a lot of folks out there have no back up strategy and dump all their photos on their local hard drive only to lose it in the next boom-event (ie, virus, hard drive failure, accidentally formatting your hard drive while trying to install Linux on a separate drive – yeah.. that happens too ;) ).
So how do you get access to this free space and use it as an alternative to Google Docs and other sharing systems (such as Picasa and/or Flickr, etc)?
Right.. lets start shall we?
How to use SecureShare in GBridge
As part of a series of how to articles for GBridge, lets look at how to share files across your sessions. There are many ways to keep files stored in a central server (such as Google Docs) to access whenever you wish to, however, this method is slightly different. For newbies like me, its an easy way to get access to your documents stored on one of your computers from another. For example, if you have some nice mp3’s stored at home, instead of putting them onto a USB drive and bringing them into work, you can share your mp3 folder on your home machine and listen to them on the fly at work :)
The types of files that can be accessible is varied and includes popular media files such as mp3, flash video, images and even provides functionality to show the images as a slideshow :) The cool thing about this method of sharing is that because the files are not stored in a central server, you are accessing them directly from your shared PC. This means that your documents/files never stored on machines unless you authorize them :)
Right, so lets begin by creating a simple share that can be accessed from your “work” machine.
Assumptions
1. You have already set up two connections (follow my earlier guide if you need a refresher).
2. You have a folder on your home pc which contains the files you wish to access from work.
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