Computer files continue to grow larger and larger in order to feed our ever-increasing appetite for rich content. Today's word processors produce output that would have challenged the most sophisticated desktop publishing packages only a few years ago. The old floppy disks we once used are almost a distant memory. People now regularly take 3 and even 5 mega pixel digital pictures. We still need to send all this data from place to place; sharing it with our employees, customers, and partners. How can we easily and reliably move these large files from place to place?
The FTP protocol is the tool that was designed to handle this task, and it is built into all major operating systems. However, it isn't particularly easy to use, especially for everyday non-technical people. It requires special programs for uploading, and sometimes obscure knowledge of commands like put and get. To avoid this hassle, most people end up e-mailing the files.but this is full of problems. The internet's e-mail system was never even designed to allow file attachments. In order to allow this to work at all, each attachment is converted into text, using an encoding method called MIME. If you saw the mail before it reaches your mailbox, you'd see that even a simple word document looks like hundreds of pages of random text. It is a wonder that the system works as well as it does. However, e-mail is less than ideal for larger files. Many mailboxes have limited sizes, and large e-mails sometimes get corrupted in transit, or at the best they can clog up mail severs with multiple copies of large files when multiple people are carbon copied on the same mail. From a security standpoint, all standard e-mails containing file attachments are sent across the internet in the clear and can be easily viewed by even the most amateur hacker with easily available tools.
There is a better solution. InLine's Visual File Transfer System provides a simple web based interface with full drag and drop functionality for uploading and downloading files. A user can be issued a secure login and password through a simple administrative interface on your own secure site. That user is granted a personal file space, and can easily upload files to it just by dragging them to his or her box. The system handles all the complexity for you, seamlessly uploading the file, and even e-mailing you to let you know when a new file has been uploaded. If you add a file to that user's file box, they are automatically e-mailed to let them know they have a new file. You can easily control who can see what, giving as much or as little access as you need to each user.
Best of all, the files are kept securely in InLine's datacenter, attached to our high-speed redundant internet connections, so your customer or employee can be assured of excellent performance and quick uploads and downloads, without your company having to invest in a T1 or other expensive high-speed connections.
Add the Visual File Transfer System to your company web site today for a very small initial investment and monthly costs as low as $49 per month. For more information or a demo please contact your InLine account representative.