Mangomind has some happy customers

By Ann Harrison
Network World Peer-to-Peer Newsletter, 03/12/01

Mangomind, the Internet file-sharing service that I wrote about last time, is receiving praise from early customers. Developed by Mangosoft Corp. of Westborough, Mass., the service lets users share files on an Internet drive that is integrated into the Windows operating system.

Tom Gora, director of information services at Ginsburg Development of Hawthorne, NY, says Mangomind has helped ease communications to workers at remote construction sites. According to Gora, the company has data on Novell and NT networks and was worried about finding a remote data-sharing solution that ran on both.

Instead of setting up an expensive VPN, the company selected the Mangomind drive that is independent of any operating system. " It's one network drive that everyone has access to regardless of where they are located, or how they are individually configured - either on a larger LAN, a remote network office LAN, or an individual user, " Gora says. " As an administrator, I can set up rules about who has certain levels of access and precedence in terms of editing and changing content of a directory. "

Gora says the company has rented about 100 megabytes of storage space on the Mangomind drive that encrypts and backs up the data. He says he no longer worries about hard-drive capacity, server space and configuring remote access to the heterogeneous network that supports the company's construction-management software.

" When you add the cost of a Mangomind drive to the cost of an inexpensive DSL circuit, you are below the price of an alternative which is buying a point-to-point data circuit, " says Gora, who estimates the company is saving $300 per month in costs and much more in peace of mind.

Mike Leary, CEO of eVision Technologies, a Reading, Mass., consulting firm in., says his company is using the Mangomind drive to connect employees at remote client sites. His CTO, Shaun Larkin, says eVision created restricted access folders on the drive to store project files, project updates, proposal letters, financial statements, strategic business plans and human resources documents. Employees use the drive both as a collaboration tool and to back up data from personal laptops.

" This is a way of having a virtual office at our fingertips, we can interact with each other and there is no overhead, " Larkin said. " The only way that someone could get in would be someone working for us; it is more secure than our internal network would be. "

Leary says the company is saving man-hours by managing data more efficiently and may use it to distribute software updates. He adds that the drive can be used both offline and online to synchronize files. " We do a lot of work in documents e-mailed to another person with comment, and before you know it, you have two or three versions of the same document on multiple machines, " Leary said. " If you have one current version saved on the Mangomind drive, you have one copy on nobody's machine and it is the most current version. "