SharePoint, Online Storage Services, Web Sites -- Too Many Locations
- By Mathew Baldwin on March 05, 2007
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FacebookRecently, I've been thinking about how annoying it's having my files scattered across different services and how customers must feel when they have to access yet another place for data. Multiple hosting companies are beginning to offer SharePoint services, Online Storage drive services, other collaboration services, and not to mention their classic web hosting products where customers can store files.
None of these services appear to be integrated. Hosting companies need to be moving towards coupling services like SharePoint and Online Drives together so customers can have one location to push and pull files to and from, especially if they're after the SMB market, not necessarily the consumer file storage market. Sure, you can mount a local drive to the SharePoint document store, but a hosting company should write a utility that allows the customer to simply double-click and have access to the files.
The host could build a web-interface for the file library that renders an aggregated list of the customers' files across all services, then surface the ability for customers to publish these files from one location to another. An example would be a customer who wishes to publish a document they've been working on with teammates in SharePoint to their public website. Simply log into the centralized interface and tell the host to publish that file to the website.
To me, it's important that the customer has a single location they can go to retrieve all of their documents and other related files. With SharePoint, online drives, web site directories, etc. -- more and more locations are being introduced to the customer, the trick will be in how to integrate all of these locations so the customers know they have access to their files regardless of the route they take getting there.
Mathew Baldwin has been working within the hosted services space for the last ten years. In the past he has held roles as architect, senior systems engineer and regular troubleshooter, consultant for Microsoft-based platforms with multiple hosted services companies. He was instrumental in bringing t... (Read full bio)
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