Novell Tries Enterprise File Sharing Without That Pesky Cloud
Consider this. What if you’re an IT manager and have a lot of requests from employees to support a file-sharing service like, say, DropBox, or even Box? You’d like to play ball, but you’re just not comfortable with all that cloud stuff going on with either one of them.
Well, you’re not alone, and the networking company Novell — yes, that Novell — would probably like to have a talk with you. Today it launched a service called Filr (pronounced “filer,” get it?) that it says provides that same kind of mobile-friendly, access-anywhere type of experience for enterprise files that you might expect from other services, but that leaves total control of what can and can’t be shared and with whom in the hands of IT managers.
Better yet — if you think this is a good thing, and some certainly will — instead of farming those files out to the cloud using infrastructure you can’t see or touch, let alone control, it uses your company’s existing IT infrastructure. It just makes it seem more cloud-y than it actually is. Everything stays on premise, and files maintain the permissions they already have. But they’re accessible from mobile devices and can be shared both inside and outside the organization, and they don’t need to be duplicated for that purpose because they stay right where they are.
The service is available today, like those cloud-based products sold on a subscription basis, though some Novell customers using its Open Enterprise Server or Novell Open Workgroup Suite can have it added on.
And yes, this is the same Novell that became part of the privately held Attachmate Group back in 2010 and that previously fought a seemingly endless legal battle with SCO Group over Linux.
