Launched in the past week was Egnyte, a new content sharing solution that enables users to powerfully organize, share and search through information. What makes Egnyte a bit different is that it contains a desktop-based application and supports continuous synchronization with the users’ online workspace.
How It Works
Sign up is quick on the site, and when you are done, you are asked to download the Egnyte synchronization software. After downloading the software, you choose folders on your computer that you would like to be synchronized with your Egnyte
workspace online. After you have allowed time for the software to sync, you can search and download your data from any other computer with an internet connection.
Egnyte does upload emails from programs like Outlook, and has tagging support to help with organization. Users can selectively share their information (files, folders, emails or tags) with others. This is where Egnyte has the strongest feature set. Instead of simply being an online backup service, Egnyte is more of an online data access point for you and for others.
Opinion
Egnyte is a very useful service for many people. I think that first and foremost, this service is useful as a backup resource for users who would like to access their information from other places. This seems like a mix of services offered by companies like Box.net (manual online storage – wonderful by the way) and Carbonite (online storage which automatically syncs). One interesting application of this service would be group project storage. Three users could sign up for this service and share information from each of their computers into a shared workspace on Egnyte. This could be very useful for anything from school projects to business file storage from multiple computers.
