I'm a sucker for "free" in headlines, and of course that's what the vendors that this week have rolled out freebies are counting on (as am I, in getting you to read this of course).
Not that I'm going to jump on all these offers myself, but I figured I'd at least pass them along to all of you for consideration.
As always, getting something for nothing is rare, and in the tech world, it usually means you're going to get nudged to upgrade at some point if you want the really good stuff...
1. Google's new Drive for Education is an extension to its free Apps for Education offering, which includes collaborative email, calendaring and document services. What Drive brings is unlimited storage, including for files up to 5TB in size, to the 30 million students and educators that Google claims to have on Apps for Education. To boot, compliance and auditing tools are included. Of course, what Google gives it can also take away, as the ever-growing Google Graveyard shows.
2. Zendesk Inbox: a new and free tool for small teams that's designed to store all of your group emails (such as info@, news@, support@, jobs@) in one place so it's easier to manage them. You can sign up for the customer support software firm's new offering here for free, to test it out (Zendesk says the offering is forever free for beta customers). Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Alexander Aghassipour says Zendesk, which has been around for 7 years, was looking for a way to bring Yammer-like capabilities used for internal communications to the area of external communications management.
Zendesk3. WWPass BlackBook and Personal Secure Storage: This Windows PC download includes two free consumer tools based on the company's commercial multi-factor authentication and privacy protection system. BlackBook is a password manager for the storage and retrieval of user credentials, while Personal Secure Storage is a cloud-based system that keeps documents and photos secure. You can download the Windows edition here. An Android offering is also available for mobile devices, and an iOS version is on the way.
4. CloudFlare Universal SSL: More and more websites are looking to enable SSL encryption to protect their visitors from eavesdroppers and hackers. Now web infrastructure company CloudFlare will make it a bit easier by adding that feature to the free version of its hosting service. More details from CloudFlare here.
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This article includes reporting from Mikael Ricknas, IDG News Service.