Syncplicity

Tip of the Week: Syncing files between Microsoft Office and Google Docs

One popular feature of Syncplicity is the ability to sync Microsoft Office documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with Google Docs. By linking Syncplicity to your Google Docs account (either a gmail account or a Google Apps account) you can specify a folder (and sub folders) in Google Docs that will automatically sync with a folder (and sub folders) on your computer.

You can edit the documents in either Microsoft Office or within Google Docs. And your files will automatically sync to all of your computers and will be accessible on your mobile devices and other cloud apps like Salesforce.  

How does it work? Syncplicity automatically synchronizes and converts Micorosft Office documents (.doc, .txt, .ppt, .xls) from a folder on your local computer and publishes them to Google Docs in Google's native file formats, and visa versa.

For example, if you save a presentation in Google Docs, that presentation will be synced to your computer as a Microsoft Powerpoint document. If you create a spreadhseet on your computer using Microsoft Excel that document will be synced to Google Docs as a spreadsheet.

Some of the ways this is being used by our customers:

• It gives them access to Google Docs (documents, spreadsheets and presentations) when they are offline. They can edit them on a plane and sync them back to Google when they are back online.
• It gives them an easy way to use Microsoft Office to create documents but then allow others to access, share, modify and collaborate on those documents in the cloud using Google Docs, even if they do not have Microsoft Office or Syncplicity installed.
• It allows them to create documents, spreadhseets and presentations in Google Docs that are then automatically accessible from their mobile devices (iPhone, iPad and Android) as well as other cloud-based applications like Salesforce.

Here's how you set it up:

1. If you are linking with a Google Apps account you will need to log in to your account at least once through your browser and select “Stay signed in.”
2. Login to the Syncplicity user account at https://my.syncplicity.com
3. Click on the Google Docs tab
4. Click on Link to Google Docs button
5. Grant access to allow Syncplicity to access and synchronize with your Google Docs account
6. Choose a folder in your Syncplicity Account to synchronize with Google Docs. The content of this folder and its sub folders will be uploaded to Google Docs and content from Google Docs will be synchronized to this folder and sub folders. The default setting is My Documents but many users create a new folder to give themselves more control over what is synced.
7. Select your conversion options. You have a choice of file formats for each file type. When you create a new file within Google Docs, this setting determines what type of file Google Docs will save the new document as on your computer. Existing files and files created in any Google Docs supported file format, such as .DOC, .RTF, and .TXT, on your computer that are modified in Google Docs will always synchronize to and from your computer as their original file type as long as the type is supported. Recommended settings for each file type are the Microsoft Office file types.
8. Click Finish.

Here are some additional hints:

• Syncplicity will sync a single folder and its sub-folders on your desktop to a single folder (and sub folders) in Google Docs. When setting up Syncplicity for Google Docs you should link a single folder on your desktop to a single folder on Google Docs. You can then create sub folders under that root folder which will then sync automatically.
• If you have a Google Apps Premier account, you can also choose to not convert your files. Your files will be synced but not converted by Google Docs. You will be able to view files created using Microsoft Office but not edit them within Google Docs. New files created within Google Docs will not sync back to your Syncplicity account.

Interested in learning more? Watch a demo

Are you using Syncplicity to sync between your computers and Google Docs? How are you using it???

The Power of "Unsave"

We spend a lot of time worrying about recovering files we’ve deleted. But what about recovering files we’ve “Saved” accidentally?

It's ironic that clicking “Save”, an action that, by definition, is supposed to keep your data safe, is actually one of the most destructive acts that you can do to your files. When you save a file, the original file is deleted and a new one takes its place. But what if you made a mistake in saving and the original file is what you really wanted?

“Tough luck” and “be more careful” next time has traditionally been the answer!

Unlike the feared “Delete”, saving is easy and almost second nature. There are no safeguards, no warning dialogs, no trash can or recycle bin to recover from, and no recovery/undo if something goes wrong. Backups can help you get back a file version from one month, one week, or one day ago. But they can't help you with getting back a file version from one second ago. This is unfortunate as it is often a number of seconds that make the difference between making a terrible mistake that you can’t recover from.

Many years ago in 2007 when we were first starting Syncplicity, I remember being at a Kinko's at 4am creating packets for our first fund raising round. Raising money is a paperwork intensive process with lots of legal details that have to be followed to the letter. One of these details was ensuring each complicated packet was identical except for a unique tracking number. Attention to small, menial details doesn't generally pair well with sleep deprivation. This night was no exception.

After about an hour and a half of work, to my horror I realized I had been opening the same files but instead of doing a “Save As” to save each edited copy with its own unique name, at some point in the night I had just been clicking “Save”. I had been losing the entire copy of each unique packet as well as its unique tracking code. At that time of night it would have been impossible to repeat all the work.

After a moment of panic, I also remembered I was running an early version of Syncplicity! Because of its realtime sync and continuous data protection, with just a few clicks I was able to retrieve and rename every version of every file for every packet I had been creating. In minutes. Disaster averted!

If I wasn't running Syncplicity at the time, I would have been in deep trouble even with the best of breed backup software of the day.

Given how often people make the mistake of saving, we built Syncplicity to not just give you access to your files on all your computers and mobile devices, but also to help make your computer a more forgiving place to prevent one of the most common forms of data loss. Which, if you're like me, means you get to sleep a little better, and a little longer, at night!

Has something similar happened to you?

Leonard Chung
Co-Founder and Chief Product Strategist

Tip of the Week: Controlling File Access Outside Your Business

All of us have more computers and devices than ever before: work computers, home computers, smart phones, tablets, etc. We need to have our files and folders available whenever and wherever we need them. And we need to share those files with more and more people to get our work done.

File management solutions that utilize cloud storage to sync files to user's devices and allow them to share files and folders with others are widely used by consumers and quickly becoming mission-critical for business users.

As a result, IT staff have a dilemma. How do you satisfy your users while keeping your business safe from exposure of confidential information, protecting your intellectual property, and maintaining control over corporate data?

With Syncplicity Business Edition you can give your users all the power of a leading cloud-based storage, sync, mobile access, sharing and backup solution, with the controls your business requires.

Syncplicity allows you to restrict users from sharing folders and sending files (via Shareable Links) to people who are outside your organization using two of our many permission settings and controls.

With these features, IT Administrators can:

• Allow or disallow sharing of folders between employees and anyone outside the business
• Allow or disallow download of files via Shareable Links by users outside the organization

These settings are available under "Set Organizational Policy" option in your Syncplicity Administration Console.

If you are an IT Administrator and have users with Syncplicity Personal Edition, but would like to utilize these these controls for your business, contact us to discuss ways to upgrade to Syncplicity Business Edition. Or simply try Syncplicity Business Edition for free by registering for a trial or upgrading your existing account!

Tip of the Week: Send Large Files with Syncplicity Shareable Links

In today's age of high resolution photos, videos and complex presentations it's hard to escape the need to send people large files. Unfortunately, it's unlikely you'll escape email attachment limits!

Cloud-based file management solutions make it easier than ever to share files, but there are times when you will still need to email them to people who do not have access to your shared folders. If you are using Syncplicity to sync your folders to the cloud you can easily send files of any size (no file limits!) and avoid email attachment limits. It's an easy alternative to file-sending services like YouSendIt or using FTP servers.

It's this easy:

1. Right click on a file you want to send and select "Create Shareable LInk" from the Syncplicity menu
2. Email that link to whoever needs access to the file
3. Recipients click on the link and simply download the file! It's that simple!

In addition to making it easy to send large files, a Syncplicity shareable link is persistent. It doesn't expire. That means when you update the file on your computer just tell your contacts to download the file again and they'll get the latest version! No need to send a new link!

What could be even cooler than that? With the latest version of Syncplicity iPhone and iPad Apps you can create a shareable link for a file directly on your mobile device and email or SMS the link without having to access the file on your computer! You can give people access to any file you have stored in your Virtual Private Cloud no matter where you are, and without having to log in to a VPN.

Enjoy!

Top Ten File Management Mistakes

For all the things that computers allow us to get done faster, document management and file management – or more precisely, the lack thereof – is one aspect of computer use that can really slow you down, especially without the right file management software solution in place. Don’t be a victim of poor file management. Whether you use a Mac or PC or whether you live off the files housed on your corporate file server, here are the top ten file management mistakes to avoid:

1. No File Backup There are islands of data out there in the computer world with no backup and systems set up to backup only while your computer is connected to the corporate network. It is hard to overstate the importance of backing up your PC, Mac, and file server. Losing files to a virus, power surge, computer theft, IT mishap, or a spilled cup of coffee should not also mean the loss of all your critical data. If manual backups are too much work or keeping track of external drives is what is keeping you from backing up your files, you should know that automatic file backup services like Syncplicity exist and are simple to set up and use. Save yourself the frustration and cost of losing a hard drive or computer and set up an automatic file backup service that does the work for you, ensuring that your files are never lost again.

2. Not Synchronizing Files across Multiple Computers A decade ago, it may have seemed incomprehensible that both business and personal users would be managing multiple computers, servers, laptops, and mobile devices as the norm. The reality is that most people now use several computers, servers, and mobile devices in the course of day-to-day work, which is leaving more users with the challenge of managing files across multiple devices and servers. How do you ensure that the latest version of the file you need is on the computer in front of you, no matter where it was that you originally saved it? How do you avoid the common work-arounds, from check-in/check-out solutions to emailing documents to yourself? Good file management these days means automatic file synchronization, which requires some form of software or software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. Manual synchronization is too risky and time consuming to be anything more than a temporary solution. Finding a solid file synchronization solution is critical for good file management.

3. Generic File Names “Untitled” may be a popular title for works of art, but when it comes to computer files, “untitled” is not a good cue for remembering the contents of a business document. Avoiding generic file names may seem obvious, but it is important to remember how easy it is to name a document by the category of work that it fits into, “marketing-campaign.ppt” or “email-to-customers.txt.” The issue is that when working on a project, it is easy to think about that project in the context of what you are working on that day or week: “This week, I have to write up a marketing strategy document, respond to a customer service issue, and prepare a new email campaign.” The problem is that three weeks later, when you are looking at files called marketing-strategy.ppt, customer-issue.doc, and email-campaign.txt, how sure are you to remember what those documents contain? Worse, what if you guess incorrectly and assume those files are related to other projects you were working on, say, last year? Thinking of file names as a memory cue rather than the category of work that they fall under is the best way to get yourself into the habit of creating specific file names. Try setting up a naming system for your files like:

[year.month.day]_[category]_[project name].[file extension]

Example:

2011.06.01_marketing_western-region-branding-strategy.doc

What is important is that you stay specific and remain consistent about using your file naming approach.

4. The Curse of Incomprehensible File Names This problem arises most often when downloading online documents: 8n20cncjsksf6qi432f.pdf may mean something to a computer somewhere in the world, but what matters most is what ‘8n20cncjsksf6qi432f’ means to you. When you are busy downloading online reports with random strings of letters and numbers for file names, be sure to rename the document to something you understand before too much time passes. Making a habit of changing these horrendously unhelpful file names to something humans can read will save you time later and keep you from having to re-download a file that you may already have.

5. A Desktop for All Your Files If your computer’s desktop is your catch-all for new files – downloads from the web, pictures from Facebook, letters to your business colleagues, copies of hilarious email chains – you may be a digital hoarder. A computer desktop should be treated like a real desk. A desktop lets you temporarily set a file down that you may have pulled out of your file cabinet, but at the end of the day, the file needs to go back to its usual storage place. Otherwise, your desktop quickly becomes cluttered with all kinds of files that you may rarely need.

6. DDSD: Delayed Document Save Disorder If you enjoy working for thirty to forty minutes on end editing a spreadsheet or word processing document before saving your work, you may be a victim of DDSD: Delayed Document Save Disorder. You should be especially concerned if you keep your computer or laptop’s power chord within kicking distance of your feet. You work hard to transcribe your brilliance into your computer documents so do yourself a favor and preserve your ingeniousness by saving work in progress. Consider getting in the habit of regularly hitting Ctrl-S on a PC or Command-S on a Mac as you create and edit your documents. It’s never a good use of time to have to recreate an entire document from the ground up – which is to say nothing of the frustration that comes with it.

7. Underutilization of Subfolders Dropping dozens upon dozens of files into one massive folder may make it easy to know where a file is housed but may not make it easy to find once you get there. Try to anticipate what you need in terms of organization when you set up a new folder to help keep you organized at the outset. For proposals and presentations, consider creating ‘Draft’ and ‘Final’ folders to help you sort completed documents from works in progress. Using subfolders will help keep like documents together and reduce the amount of time you spend sorting through a pile of miscellaneous files later on.

8. Redundant Master File Folders ‘Biz Docs,’ ‘Documents,’ ‘Work Documents,’ and ‘Docs’: which one has the sales document you need to send to your regional manager? When you set up master folders – folders like a Documents folder that house most of your core documents and file folders – you want to be sure that those folders remain your primary go-to folder for storing all your documents. This is especially critical when these folders reside on a shared server or corporate intranet. When you start creating multiple master folders without a clear distinction between what the purpose of that particular master folder is, like Sales Data and Sales Metrics, for example, you can end up splitting similar documents between multiple masters. When in doubt, keep it simple and clean. Keep your master folders specific and make sure that you adhere to the purpose that that master file is supposed to serve.

9. Email Attachments as a Substitute for Backup This is a particularly easy trap to fall into given how often most of us leave our email accounts open at work: you need to quickly back up a file or work on it from home later, so you email it to yourself. What makes this a poor replacement for a comprehensive file backup solution is that most email programs provide no easy way to let you look at your attachments without opening each email first. Worse, most programs make it extremely difficult to search for attachments, so retrieving backed up files in this way usually means having to manually sort through emails one by one to locate just one document, and the longer a backup file sits in your email, the longer it usually takes to locate it. No matter how careful you are to sort emails into appropriate folders and keep your inbox organized, email programs are not set up as a file management application so using email as an ad hoc file backup program is almost never a good idea.

10. Storing Key Files on a Thumb Drive Thumb drives are the new floppy disk, and while there are a few things that thumb drives may do well – like making for extremely fashionable key chains – thumb drives are not a good place to keep the one and only copy of must-have files, like PowerPoint presentations for that conference you’re heading to. We’re still surprised at how many well-meaning people out there try to use thumb drives as a non-virtual virtual folder for important documents. Unlike actual virtual folders that backup and store key documents in the cloud, and save and track versions, non-virtual storage devices like thumb drives have key vulnerabilities, including their ability to get lost or damaged. The most common violation is opening and editing documents directly on a thumb drive without first creating a local copy on your computer hard drive or file server.

Syncplicity is a comprehensive file sync, share and file management solution for businesses and personal users. Syncplicity gives you the ability to access, share, automatically back up, and collaborate on all your files from anywhere.

Customer Case Study: SingleFeed

We're constantly hearing from customers how they're using Syncplicity in their businesses to help them save money and succeed better. We've heard from many that they'd like to hear how others are using Syncplicity so we're starting a series of case studies to highlight some of our customers. Join us in meeting some companies who are using Syncplicity Business Edition to solve real and critical business problems. Interested in highlighting how you use Syncplicity Business Edition in your company in a future blog post? Send an e-mail to Pat Richardson at pat@syncplicity.com and let us know! “We rely upon Syncplicity Business Edition to keep our business running smoothly.” – Brian Smith, SingleFeed CEO

Customer

SingleFeed is a company with offices in Portland and San Francisco and contractors across the country. With a geographically distributed team that often travels, they adopted Google Apps to provide a Cloud Computing solution for their distributed workforce. Gmail is used for all of their internal e-mail, Google Calendar for their calendaring, and Google Docs internal collaboration. Google Apps is part of the standard IT configuration for every employee.

Challenge

While Google Apps worked well for internal communication and documents of less than 10MB, larger files were shared internally using a file server and VPN. External communication was done using an external FTP server which was slow and cumbersome. In addition, the multitude of places that were being used to store, share, and collaborate on files was unwieldy. “It was a huge challenge to manage and maintain all of our files across Google Apps, File Servers, and FTP servers – not to mention people’s laptops and desktops – across our geographically distributed locations. We had to remember where our files and latest versions were, were hitting limitations that differed by system, and were always worried about losing important information. The system was too fragile, costly, and time consuming,” said Brian Smith, CEO.

Solution

Syncplicity Business Edition is used to handle all of their file management, sharing, and collaboration needs in conjunction with Google Apps. Through this solution, SingleFeed was able to replace their File Server and FTP Server along with the associated costs and hassle. In addition, files on laptops and desktops that were previously unmanaged are now centrally managed, backed up, synchronized, and accessible anywhere both in the cloud and offline. “I stopped having to worry about forgetting an important file at the office while on the road, not having backups and previous versions of my important information, or jumping through hoops to share files with co-workers or customers,” said Ryan Douglas, Business Development Manager. According to Smith, “Syncplicity Business Edition and Google Apps are a winning combination. We love the tight integration from sync to single sign-on between the two. Syncplicity has brought together our files and our team so that wherever we’re working, whether in a web browser or a desktop, we always know we have what we need to get the job done.” Click here to learn more about SingleFeed.