Online Storage 2.0: Six Sites Reviewed

mikemuch writes "Services like box.net, openomy, and eSnips are more than just places to access your files from the web. Some include media organization tools, Windows shell integration, drag-and-drop uploading, tagging, and social content sharing. ExtremeTech has a review up of six online storage services with Web 2.0 twists."

Comments

Re:Yippee - 6 more sites to add to the "banned" li

[rainman_bc]

Props to you for such a great reply to such an ass hat IT person.

Truth is, many IT people don't seem to "get" it. They call everything a security hole and make b2b communications more difficult.

Not everything needs tight-arsed security. If I want my outside people to send me a file with not-so-sensitive information that isn't very useful to anyone else, I think they should be able to FTP it to me ( or SFTP or SCP or FTP with SSL if pedantic IT people were so inclined). Instead of an ass-hat saying " you can't have an ftp server up because it's a security hole", the ass hat IT person should say "I'll set up a secure FTP server instead and they can send it there".

I've had those conversations all the time with idiot IT people.

Truth is I think they're just on a rampage sometimes without any real knowledge of why they're doing something.

That said, the IT department at the company I work for is the first competent group I've seen. They locked down IM, but set up a jabber server instead with an MSN gateway. IMO that's the way to go - set something up that's a viable alternative instead of just saying "no" to anyone who wants anything.

Fuck sometimes it'd be just easier to pull all ethernet cables.

Re:Yippee - 6 more sites to add to the "banned" li

[bberens]

I call shenanigans. We use an SSL VPN solution through active-X or applet (the VPN router supports both) at my office. The SSL certificate we use is invalid and Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, etc. disallow me to view the page even after I've attempted manually importing the certificate. However, IE let's me right through with a simple warning. For those few of us without access to IE at home, that means we can't use the VPN. All they'd have to do is get a proper certificate and everything would be solved. But the response I get is "We can't support every flavor" or "We don't support linux." Nevermind the gaping security hole which is just waiting for someone to man-in-the-middle our VPN to gain access to important data files. This sort of response is typical to every IT department I've ever come across. I realize you may be nice and friendly and will at least attempt to be helpful but that makes you not in the 'norm'.

Run your own

[Plug]

I spent quite some time looking for a way to run my own web-based file transfer site so accountants could stop e-mailling 10MB data files to each other.

The best I've seen is Boxroom, an OSS Ruby on Rails application for web based file transfer. With the Mongrel web server it does upload progress, recent versions have had in-file search added, and my employer is currently sponsoring the implementation of virtual hosting in it.

I would like more people to know about this program - it's very cool, and more developers on it would be certainly be appreciated by all of us who use it!