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magazine
11
Collaboration
File sharing
made easy
Printer vendors no longer just provide
printers and MFPs. Today, they also
provide solutions. Having started with
printer and document management,
they are now moving into other areas,
notably collaboration. Brother has
recently launched its Omnijoin web
conferencing solution (reviewed in
the next issue) and Sharp has brought
out a cloud-based file sharing and
collaboration system called Cloud
Portal Office (CPO).
Before describing CPO in more detail,
it should be explained that it is designed
to run on Sharp’s Cloud Portal platform.
This cloud-based system, pre-installed on
new generation Sharp MFPs, gives users
a means of connecting to multiple web
services with a single sign-on.When they
log on, users are presented with buttons
for the services they subscribe to and
just click on the one they want. The IT
department or administrator has complete
control over who can access services and
is able to cancel/add subscriptions and
change access permissions instantly.
Cloud Portal can be accessed from
any web browser on a PC, Mac, laptop,
tablet or smartphone, as well as from the
touchscreen displays on cloud-ready Sharp
MFPs and BigPad interactive whiteboards.
Chris Hale, Sharp product marketing
manager for solutions and software,
told
Business Info
that just two services
will be available through Cloud Portal
initially, Cloud Portal Office (CPO) and
a connector for Dropbox. However, he
Sharp has launched a secure, cloud-based file sharing and
collaboration solution for small and medium-sized businesses
consumer-focused solutions, is that files
never leave the company’s control.
“Once somebody shares a file using
YouSendIt or a private Dropbox account,
the business has lost control of that
document. They don’t know whether
the document, which could contain
intellectual property or commercially
sensitive information, is going to stay on
Dropbox indefinitely. If a user leaves the
business, will they take the document
with them? How will the business
recover that document and make sure it
has been deleted from the service?
A user will have their own password,
which means the whole thing has
been moved out of the business
administrator’s hands. That is a concern.
Businesses are worried about sensitive
documents being left around in the cloud
for someone to find or take away and
use inappropriately,” Hale said.
CPO is geared to the needs of
business users in other ways, too. Every
file is virus-checked and encrypted; file
synchronisation includes a full audit trail,
versioning and roll-back facilities; and
documents are automatically OCR’d to
generate indexable data (users can add
metadata to OCR information).
For the time being, the OCR
capability is primarily associated with
the indexing and search and retrieval
of files, rather than the generation of
editable documents, which can be done
using separate Sharpdesk software. Nor
is there any facility for online editing, as
you might find in Office 365 or Google
Docs, or for disaster recovery or file
archiving. However, for simple, secure file
sharing, it is worth investigating.
CPO is based on a per-user
subscription model, with prices starting
at around £11 per user, per month for
10GB of storage (50GB upgrades are
available). Storage allowances are per
user and are not aggregated across the
organisation.
It enables
users to
upload and
download files
and store them
in folders that
can be shared
via a secure
login
Free software for Sharp BigPad interactive whiteboards enables
users to log onto an online Cloud Portal Office account and
pull documents down to a virtual drive on the whiteboard.
Users of Sharp OSA-enabled MFPs (version 4.0 onwards) can
interact with Cloud Portal Office from the MFP display and scan to
and print from it directly (direct printing limited to PDF, JPEG, GIF).
expects the number to increase over
time. “Cloud Portal is the mechanism we
will use to deliver more and more of our
services,” he said. “At launch, we will have
a Dropbox connector and CPO and we
will be adding further connectors in the
future. A likely list is Office 365, Google
Docs, possibly Evernote and others.”
Cloud Portal Office
Cloud Portal Office is a file sharing and
collaboration facility developed by Sharp
Labs America and hosted on the Amazon
Web Services server in Dublin (Cloud
Portal is hosted by Fujitsu in Germany).
It enables users to upload and download
files and store them in folders that can
be shared with colleagues and business
associates via a secure log-in.
An administrator can quickly set up
and remove subscriptions and create
groups that can share information.
Or you can allow sharing across the
business. It is also possible to set up
an account for a third party that you
regularly share documents with.
Hale said the service is likely to
appeal to small and medium-sized
businesses, especially those spread across
multiple sites or with a large number of
mobile workers, that require a secure file
sharing system hosted in the EU without
the complications of managing an FTP
server or VPN tunnelling.
“One of the concerns businesses
have had is that they don’t want their
documents going outside the European
Union. That was one of the key factors
in deciding how the system was going to
be structured.We have ensured that the
disaster recovery facilities Amazon have
put in place for us also stay within the
European Union and that they don’t go
outside to, say, China to get the cheapest
possible storage for back-up and disaster
recovery,” he said.
Another benefit of CPO, compared to
