Syncplicity Enhances Sync and Cloud Computing for Google Apps
I am excited today to announce the availability of our latest Syncplicity Business Edition. This release focuses on adding new capabilities for Google Apps users in conjunction with Google’s announcement of the Upload any file feature to Google Docs. By using both Syncplicity and Google Docs, customers may now seamlessly sync and store any file from their computers to and from Google Docs. Docs can then be used to access and edit these files anywhere.
We’ve had the pleasure of working with Google and their new Google Docs API over the past several months to bring business customers new and critical capabilities around sync, file management, collaboration, sharing, automated back-up and instant restore. We also had the benefit of more than 5,000 joint Google Apps and Syncplicity customers using our products together to sync nearly one million files to guide our requirements for a more integrated, feature-rich solution.
Feedback from many customers shows that they want to move more aggressively to cloud computing and online storage using applications like Google Docs, but want to do so without entirely abandoning the desktop or the ability to use existing desktop apps like Microsoft Office. Our customers, however, don’t want to worry about uploading files and downloading files manually, which computer or place they last left a file, not being able to use their preferred app, and if they were working with the latest version of a document.
In addition, customers want to move between those environments seamlessly. They want a solution that supports centralized file management of any file inside or outside of the firewall, any file type or size, automated back-up and instant restore, as well as policy-controllable sync, sharing and collaboration. And they want these things to automatically work in the background through an integrated solution.
With today’s release, along with Google’s announcement, we now offer that solution to customers.
A 30-day free trial of the latest Syncplicity Business Edition is available for any user to try by clicking here. If you’re a Google Apps Premier Edition customer, we’re offering a free 30-day trial and if you order by March 31st, you’ll get 3 months free with your first annual subscription by registering here.
With the new capabilities, customers can now sync, upload, and store any file with Google Docs. Microsoft Office documents such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files can also be richly edited.
Google Apps customers who also are using Syncplicity can:
- Seamlessly use existing files, such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Adobe Acrobat PDFs already on their desktops, with Google Docs without the need to manually upload them.
- Synchronize, share, back-up, and centrally manage all file types with one seamless and easy to use solution.
- Continuously synchronize files in real time between Google Docs and desktops. Customers are assured that users are always working on the up-to-date latest versions of each file.
- Open and edit their documents within existing desktop applications such as Microsoft and then open and edit those same documents seamlessly within Google Docs.
- Provide different users on the same team with the choice of collaborating using Microsoft Word, Google Docs or another preferred application.
- Have automatic real-time back-up with previous version support and instant restore of any file.
- Set policy and administrative controls on an individual or company-wide basis.
- Synchronize and back-up any file type of any file size.
- Scale to an unlimited number of users and storage.
Pricing for Syncplicity Business Edition starts at $45 per month for the first 3 users and scales with the addition of more users and storage.
We’ve been very happy to work with the Google team. They are focused on delivering new ways to give customers the best and easiest access to all their information online. Working together to leverage cloud computing along with Google Docs, we’ve taken a lot of pain out of file management and synchronization.
Google’s new Documents List API has given us the ability to tightly integrate our solutions, allowing customers to use Google Docs and work at a whole new level.
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If you are a Google Apps Premier customer, register here to receive a free 30-day trial and 3 months off your first annual subscription.
Best Regards,
Leonard Chung, CEO
December 1st: Syncplicity Business Edition Live Demo
The Syncplicity Business Edition live demo is tomorrow! Our very own Rachel Pennig will be running you through the Syncplicity Business Edition service and the benefits to your company with Q&A shortly thereafter.
Click here to register for the December 1st live web demo at 11am PST / 2pm EST.
If you can’t make the time, let us know if you would like to see more live demos in the future.
Cheers,
The Syncplicity Team
Win Syncplicity Business Edition for Free!
In celebration of the release of Syncplicity Business Edition and being chosen by Network World as one of their Products of the Week, we’re giving away two Three-User Syncplicity Business Edition subscriptions good for one year!
Enter to win by simply:
- Leaving a comment on this post on why you want Syncplicity Business Edition
- Following @syncplicity on Twitter and retweet the following: “Retweet and enter to win a free Syncplicity biz account! Follow @syncplicity and RT: http://bit.ly/6lGExq #syncplicity”
One person will be randomly chosen from the blog comments and one will be randomly chosen from our Twitter followers. We will review blog posts and twitter entries on Tuesday, December 1st at noon PST. Winners will be announced on Twitter shortly thereafter.
Happy Holidays!
Syncplicity Business Edition Now Available!
I am excited today to announce the availability of Syncplicity Business Edition – the first sync, back-up, sharing, and collaboration solution that allows businesses to manage their files in a fully integrated way.
We’ve heard from many of you who have used our consumer product that you loved the ease-of-use and flexibility of Syncplicity but wanted the ability to use it in your business or workplace. We’ve also heard from many businesses and IT administrators that you’re struggling to manage and protect the data in your organization as users are increasingly mobile with multiple devices while still providing them the same level of flexibility and support that they need and expect.
Syncplicity Business Edition is the first solution designed to meet these needs of business users while also meeting the requirements of IT administrators and businesses. What does having an integrated solution mean for users and admins?
For users, new benefits include:
- Anywhere access to and syncing with not only files on personal computers, but also files on corporate file servers and web applications such as Google Apps, inside or outside of the firewall.
- Real-time backup and instant restore which can be managed and executed by either a user or remotely by an IT Administrator.
- Sharing and collaborating instantly with co-workers and others through individually created shares as well as new Administrator created and supported shares.
Administrators and business owners can now better manage files across the organization and support their users through new capabilities such as:
- Provisioning large numbers of users through features such as bulk user account creation and client pre-configuration.
- Remotely supporting users with help desk functionality for data such as folder management and remote restore through a central console.
- Controlling and viewing how data is flowing inside and outside of the company through policies and reporting.
- Protecting and managing files centrally across the entire organization, from files on central file servers inside the firewall to files on a laptop of a user half a world away.
- Access to priority support with the option of adding Premium Support for phone and e-mail support with one business hour time-definite response.
People love Syncplicity Business Edition, but don’t take our word for it:
“I have dealt with lots of synchronization and collaboration tools and recommended tools to enterprise clients. One of the issues is how to bring all the different data sources together from all the different devices now used in the enterprise, and to make sure they are automatically backed up and also easily available for collaboration with colleagues inside and outside the enterprise. Syncplicity’s Business Edition is the first one I’ve seen to really address this business challenge in an integrated solution”
David Coleman, Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies, a leading industry analyst and advisory services firm that focuses on collaboration technologies.
“Syncplicity has really fulfilled some critical needs for our business, letting us spend time working with our files instead of worrying about them. With Syncplicity, our distributed teams can instantly access their data, regardless of device, and we love its simplified file sync and offsite, real-time backup. Syncplicity is also setting the standard for exceptional customer service and that’s really important to users.”
Jean-Paul Otto, CEO of Dopro Domotica Professionals
“We have been very impressed with the Syncplicity service and also the support which we have received from you. It has made a HUGE difference in how we operate here.”
Gary Johnson, Xenia Police Division
With no signup fees or long-term contract, it’s easy to get started. Try Syncplicity Business Edition free for 30-days.
Want to learn more? Watch a video tour or read more about Syncplicity Business Edition.
Curious about Syncplicity Business Edition but prefer a live demo? Click here to register for the December 1st live web demo at 11am PST / 2pm EST.
Thank you again for your support, and on behalf of the Syncplicity Team, we hope you enjoy the upcoming holidays.
Why Delta Sync Doesn’t Matter
The Hype
One of the common requests we often hear is for us to implement delta sync. Since beginning our implementation, we’ve found that it really doesn’t help as much as many are expecting. Many people expect that delta sync has a large impact on syncing speeds, often times because others in the sync space have heavily advertised this feature. Many have seen demo videos like Dropbox’s where a large image is edited and only the small change made needs to be uploaded. The video says that because of delta sync, over 80% of the bandwidth was saved because of delta sync.
Claims like these are just plain misleading. As the example below shows, the savings a normal user would see is actually 0%. Looking at the types of data we see users synchronizing, the fact is most people won’t see much benefit from delta sync.
What is Delta Sync?
For those unfamiliar with delta sync, it is a technology designed to detect and send only the parts of a file that have changed. If you have a large two megabyte file and change only two bytes in it, rather than re-upload the entire two million byte file, delta sync allows you to send just the two bytes that changed. While not as useful for most small files (the bookkeeping and header information for chunk tracking starts to eat into any benefit), it appears at first glance that delta sync would seem to provide a huge benefit for large files.
A Small Example
The reason delta sync doesn’t help as much with large files is that almost all large file types are stored compressed. Videos, music, digital photos, photoshop files, PDFs, you name it — the files you deal with day-to-day are all stored compressed. Unfortunately, compression negates any benefit from delta sync. When a file is stored compressed, in the process of saving the file, the file is run through a special process that finds duplicate data and removes it. This means any change to the file, no matter how minor, changes the entire file.
So how do we get these claims of bandwidth savings for large files? With a bit of slight of hand and a some contrived circumstances. To use a concrete example, I’ll use the Dropbox demo itself. In it, a picture of a platypus is drawn over with a white X and we see the claim of 80% bandwidth savings due to delta sync. A detail that is somewhat glossed over is the fact that while a file being shown before the edit happens is a JPEG (.JPG – digital image format used by almost all digital cameras), the file actually edited is a bitmap (.BMP – an uncompressed and uncommonly used type).
I took an almost identical graphic and made a similar edit. Using the rsync tool, which is the same rsync algorithm Dropbox uses, I measured the bandwidth savings between edits made on the compressed JPG and uncompressed BMP files. The difference is striking.
For the uncompressed bitmap file, a 65K difference was generated for a 476K file, a 86.4% savings — inline with the demo.
For the compressed JPEG file, a 0K difference was generated for the 76K file, a 0% savings. There were no bytes saved versus uploading the entire file.
While the Dropbox demo doesn’t lie, it also is quite misleading. While the 86.4% savings is nice, it neglects to mention that no normal end-user uses bitmaps to store their images and the bandwidth of 65K required to send just the changes is almost as large as the entire file of 76K when it’s stored in a proper file format.
Try this with a music file, a video, photoshop files, or any other large files and you’ll find that almost none of large files commonly benefit from delta sync.
What Delta Sync is Good For
While delta sync doesn’t help much for most people’s common day to day files, it is incredibly useful for cases in which large files are stored uncompressed. The most typical case is log files for system administrators. These gargantuan text files of things like web server accesses are often hundreds of megs to many gigabytes in size. Data is just appended onto the end as additional activity is logged. This is a perfect case for delta sync.
Relative to the normal user however, use cases like these are the exception rather than the rule. Next time you see delta sync marketed about as a way to save gobs of bandwidth, definitely take those claims with a grain of salt.
How I Tested
If you’d like to try repeating the results for yourself, you can download the files I used here.
I used rsync version 2.6.9 with the following commandline to force a delta sync:
foreach f (*Edited*)
rsync –stats -e ’ssh’ $f localhost:tmp/`echo $f | sed ’s/_Edited//’`
Customer Satisfaction Survey
We recently surveyed our Syncplicity users to see how we are meeting their needs. Based on the survey outcomes, we want to share how we plan to address each of the below issues in our upcoming product development schedule.
How many people does your company employ?
Two thirds of respondents told us they worked in companies of 1-10 employees. Syncplicity is aiming to provide a solid, reliable syncing and collaboration tool for small and medium-sized companies. We’re happy to help small and medium sized team users work more closely together
What would you likely use as an alternative if Syncplicity was no longer available?
This survey result made it very clear who are competitors are. When you know who the competition is, it’s very easy to know where you need to do to be better than the other guys. As Syncplicity’s Support Guru, I’m here to promise you that while other companies have great products, my personal goal is to blow them out of the water with Syncplicity’s customer support. Customer support is just one of the areas we plan to amaze you in, and next week we’ll talk more about how we plan to compete with other companies.
How easy is it to set up and use the Syncplicity service?
Only a third of respondents told us that setting up Syncplicity was extremely easy. While an additional half of respondents told us it was still easy, our goal is to improve these responses – A new online user manual (look for it next week!) is one of our first steps towards better documentation and instructions.
Please indicate the importance you place on the following Syncplicity offerings:
Three items received a “High” ranking in response to this question, and we are happy to see that our user requests are in line with our product roadmap.
- Ability to add extra storage: If you’re using extra storage, we take this as a sign of success – you’re using our product a lot, and we should make it easy for you to continue doing that! We are currently investigating ways to make it unbelievable easy to expand your storage space with just a few clicks.
- Large file support (>2GB): Most files fall well under the 2GB size limitation, but that doesn’t mean we’re giving up on stretching those limits. We are investigating the synchronization of even larger files to make working with Syncplicity appropriate for all your files.
- Centralized user management and administration: I’m pleased to say that the last item is already something we are actively working on. If you are a business user, we’d love to have you join our beta team and give us feedback. You’ll get early access to the new tools, the chance to help us develop this new product, and free service in exchange for your feedback. To join in, email sales@syncplicity.com and tell us a bit about your business and how you might use this tool in your organization.
What would you like to receive from Syncplicity on a regular basis?
Our users let us know that announcements about the product – service messages, new features, and company updates – were important. We’ll improve our blogging and Twittering schedule to keep our users up to date.
Listening to our users is a critical and intentional act in everything we do at Syncplicity. Based on this survey, 75% of respondents would recommend Syncplicity to a friend, so hopefully that means you like what we’re doing. Thank you for everyone who completed the survey!