FolderSync Update

software-update

We’ve just released an update to FolderSync compatible with FolderGrid Appliance.

This latest major version release of FolderSync includes a modification of the Credentials tab to prompt for your FolderGrid Appliance URL. You can download FolderSync version 1.35.1 immediately from the FolderSync page here.

FolderSync is an application that installs on a user workstation and runs in the background and offers the user two different benefits:

  • The ability to use “Open Local” from the WebApp to open a document using their locally installed applications (Word, Powerpoint, etc…) where any saves of that document will be automatically and transparently saved back to FolderGrid. This is a huge time saver versus the default where the user needs to download the doc, open it, save changes, then re-upload the new version.
  • Optionally FolderSync can also be used to keep a local copy of one or more folders on the user workstation and keep it in sync with the remote folder on FolderGrid. This is useful for folks who want to continue to work on a set of documents offline and then have those changes sync up to FolderGrid when they are back online.

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FolderGrid Appliance Viability

Hearing that we have discontinued our fully-hosted FolderGrid service and now only offer our self-hosted FolderGrid Appliance, several customers have written us queries asking about the viability of our services. We understand that concern and want to post some thoughts here to help allay it.

From the beginning, we wanted FolderGrid to offer a cost-effective solution for small & medium sized businesses (SMBs) that need to provide many users access to a HIPAA compliant file storage & sharing service. We shutdown the hosted cloud service because it wasn’t cost effective for us to provide support for the myriad of end-user requests we fielded concerning our cloud-based filesystems. Based upon our experience, we now feel that the only viable business model for a fully-hosted solution is to charge per-user and there are several services out there with that model already. Our self-hosted appliance allows us to serve SMB customers who appreciate our flat pricing but have the technical chops necessary to run & maintain a HIPAA compliant appliance.

In short - we pivoted from a model that saw us selling business to business (B2B) but practically supporting business to consumer (B2C) over to a model where we are true B2B now. The full transition will take awhile - but we’re certainly committed to it. Our FolderGrid Appliance offers the same fully encrypted cloud-based filesystem atop cloud storage with a fully open API previously provided by our hosted service - but the appliance has the additional benefit of an open sourced back-end allowing customers even more extensibility.

We offer our appliance as an Amazon Marketplace AMI and as a Dockerized container. If you have any questions about how to get started - please feel free to contact us here.

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FolderGrid Service Sunset

Unfortunately, due to an inability to gain the traction necessary to adequately fund ongoing operations, we are winding down the FolderGrid service over the period ending on May 31st, 2016.

We suggest current customers take action now to migrate any data to an alternative service. At midnight Eastern on May 31, our service will stop fully and your account and data will no longer be available. At any time before that, you may cancel your subscription according to our standard terms as described here. If your account is still active at midnight Eastern on May 31, you will lose the ability to access it and therefore lose the ability to cancel your subscription. We will begin the process of canceling all remaining accounts and expect that process to take approximately several weeks. Since your data will be retained for that period we will continue to bill your account until we have fully canceled your account on your behalf and securely destroyed your data.

If you are interested in migrating to our FolderGrid Appliance and self-hosting the FolderGrid service either on Amazon AWS or by leveraging a Docker container we will support a migration of your content to that appliance. Please contact us for details.

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2014-2015 HIPAA enforcement actions

From Husch Blackwell - a summary of some significant 2014-2015 HIPAA enforcement actions:

“OCR delivered an early holiday gift, wrapped in the Director’s Sept. 23, 2015, report to the Office of Inspector General. In that report, she disclosed that OCR will launch Phase 2 of its HIPAA audit program in early 2016, focusing on noncompliance issues for both covered entities and business associates.

So, grab that cup of hot cocoa and peruse this review of 2014-2015 HIPAA enforcement actions, which should help identify noncompliance issues on which OCR will focus in 2016.” Review the listings here

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File Transfer Disruptions

At 6:18pm Eastern on February 22nd, the ability of our service to conduct file transfers (both uploads and downloads) was disrupted by maintenance at the data center hosting our Encryption Grid. Specifically, the domain name service (DNS) servers utilized by our service at Atlantic.net went offline blocking our attempts to communicate with our Storage Grid running on Amazon AWS. It took almost three hours to diagnose & resolve this issue. We were able to reroute to DNS servers hosted by Google and fully restore service at 8:52pm Eastern.

We have taken the following measures to ensure we don’t suffer another core service disruption affecting file transfers:

  • We’ve permanently adopted Google’s public DNS as our domain name service provider for our Encryption Grid
  • We’ve implemented full round-trip file transfer monitoring to more quickly detect any DNS disruptions
  • We’re evaluating alternative hosts for our Encryption Grid services
    We apologize for the service disruption and please write our customer support team with any followup questions or concerns. Thanks for using FolderGrid!
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Happy Holidays!

Thanks for using FolderGrid. We just released a minor update to our WebApp that supports recursively applying changes to your folder structure inheritance settings. As always - we welcome your feedback on our update or service!

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Download Billing History

PDFWe’re pleased to announce that Account Administrators can now download prior month invoices as PDFs directly from the “Show Invoices” option on the Account Settings page.

This weekend’s release also included better support for the Czech alphabet in filenames as well as several performance enhancements. As always - we welcome your feedback and thanks for using FolderGrid!

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September Updates

software-updateWe’re pleased to announce the release of several significant recent updates to our service:

  • Performance enhancements in a new major release of FolderGrid WinMount
  • Enhanced knowledgebase articles using specific user questions & feedback
  • Performance enhancements for our secured FTP interface
  • Addressed issue with file version ordering to ensure that last-modified timestamps are honored even when received out of order
    We welcome your feedback on these updates and as always - thanks for using FolderGrid!
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Amazon AWS Service Disruptions

Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a major cloud outage this morning with both its Elastic Compute Cloud (ECC) and Simple Storage Service (S3) solutions experiencing a large number of request errors in the U.S.

FolderGrid customers using AWS S3 as their storage provider may have experienced degraded service as a result. However service appears to be stabilized and operating normally at the current time. We continue to monitor the situation.

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New FolderSync Release

software-updateWe’ve just released FolderSync version 1.30.1 with a few bug fixes and a major functional change. With this latest release we’ve removed the ability to sync the delete of a local folder. Individually deleted local files will still be synced and their secured counterparts will be deleted but any locally deleted folders will simply be restored upon your next synchronization run.

This modified behavior is more consistent with the original design and intention of FolderSync and will avoid some potentially harmful edge case behaviors. As always - we welcome your feedback and thanks for using FolderGrid!

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