A step closer to cleaning up the mobile cloud mess

No matter how much storage you have, it’s never enough. No matter where you’ve copied a file, it’s not on the device you currently have with you. Plus, reconciling the multiple versions is a painstaking, error-prone process likely to eliminate the copy you wanted to keep. That’s why there’s cloud storage, providing access to the same file from multiple computers and mobile devices. Dropbox, Box, Google Drive (what had been Google Docs), and Microsoft SkyDrive are the most broadly available and most popular.

In fact, chances are you have several of them, perhaps even multiple accounts on one or more for work and personal needs. Although your files are broadly available on such services, they’re often inchoate. If you use mobile devices, it’s even a messier reality, as the apps you use to access documents vary widely in their supported cloud storage services. Almost all work with Dropbox and Box, but even second-tier offerings such as Google Drive and SkyDrive aren’t supported broadly — and forget about the third- and fourth-tier options.

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What we need is an integrator, a single portal to all your cloud storage services. On a PC or Mac, you can largely simulate that arrangement by creating virtual drives for many of the cloud storage services and moving files as you would with any other local disk or network file share. The major holdout from this native approach, Box, finally added that capability this month. But there’s no equivalent in the popular mobile OSes such as iOS and Android.

AppSense’s free DataNow app takes us a step in that direction. It lets you access Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Citrix ShareFile, FTP, and WebDAV storage repositories, as well as those in AppSense’s own storage service — but not Box — from one app. You can then manage files on them all, including moving or copying files from one storage service to another.

Using AppSense’s admin tools with a corporate edition of the app, you can apply corporate policies to files originating in corporate file shares, working with Active Directory groups and policies to avoid having a separate cloud storage management system for mobile and desktop users. Plus, you get Windows and OS X clients for a unified cloud storage management approach across desktop and mobile devices. AppSense User Virtualization Platform customers get the DataNow Essentials service for free; others can subscribe to the DataNow Essentials service for $59 per user per year.

I found the notion of DataNow very compelling when I saw it in beta earlier this year, but I learned many years ago that demos often don’t reflect the product reality. I waited until DataNow became available for real, which happened late last week. DataNow is offered for iOS and for Android.

DataNow is a worthwhile introduction to your Android or iOS app portfolio, but the user interface isn’t very obvious after you’ve added your storage services. I suspect many users who try it will give up on it quickly — don’t. Here’s how to use it:

• Ignore the > icon at the right of each service’s name in your storage list; tapping it opens an information screen for your account, showing free storage and the like, as well as providing an Unlink Account button. That’s nice, but not what you actually use DataNow to do.
• Tap the storage service name — not the > button, as you would expect — to access your files. Although tapping the service name is common in iOS apps, the way the names are presented in DataNow on the iPhone look more like descriptions than tappable labels. On the iPad, it’s a bit more obvious that they should be tapped.
• To manage your files — the key utility in DataNow — tap the document icon to the left of a filename, rather than the filename itself, to open a tray of buttons: Download (to copy the file to your current device), Transfer (to move it to a different service, with the option of encrypting it as you do), Lock (to encrypt it; AppSense has free Windows and OS X apps to encrypt and decrypt files for use with DataNow), Delete, and Share (to email it). Likewise, tap the folder icon to the left of the folder name to open a tray with one option: Delete.
• Tap the file name to open a preview — if DataNow knows the format, which it doesn’t always (in my testing, it couldn’t open the older .doc, .xls, and .ppt file formats, though AppSense says those file types are supported). iOS’s native Quick Look facility is better at document previews and would be a preferable choice, though Android has no such capability. DataNow’s limited support of file types means you can’t send always the document to another app in iOS, such as Quickoffice or GoodReader, because the standard iOS share tool is available only once your document is open. This is not a big deal in Android, where you can transfer the document to a local folder and open it via the desired app directly (which iOS does not do).

DataNow is a good move toward what’s needed to simplify cloud-based storage access, but it’s not enough. It definitely requires an assured ability to open files in a compatible app even if DataNow doesn’t understand the format, as well as a more intuitive UI.

But DataNow would be a lot more useful if it could serve as a central access point for your mobile device’s apps. If developers could add a hook in their apps to DataNow for use in accessing files linked to DataNow, their apps could work just like desktop programs do with cloud storage services’ virtual disks: All such disks’ cloud files are accessible in the desktop’s Open dialog boxes. This would also relieve the burden on mobile app developers to support multiple cloud services, making DataNow a common conduit to everyone’s benefit.

Support for SharePoint would be a real boon to corporate users, given that project sharing system’s popularity. (Microsoft’s lack of support for SharePoint outside Windows and Windows Phone is causing many users to abandon SharePoint as a proprietary file trap incompatible with the iOS and, increasingly, Android devices that employees commonly use outside the office.) Plus, iCloud support would be very useful for iOS and OS X users.

The other piece missing in DataNow is the ability to support multiple accounts for Dropbox and SkyDrive — neither users nor IT want to rely on one account for both personal and business files. It does support multiple accounts for DropDAV, FTP, and Google Drive, so the one-account limit with Dropbox and SkyDrive may have more to do with licensing issues.

AppSense would be smart to consider leveraging DataNow not just as a content management tool — its basic purpose — but a cloud-integration platform. Its APIs could then be licensed to developers and the personal version could be sold to OS X and Windows clients, in addition to its free iOS and Android clients. There’s much more potential here than satisfying enterprise’s document control desires.

It remains to be seen whether DataNow evolves to deliver the integrated cloud storage future that provides multi-account flexibility, greater support of corporate storage services, and simplified document access on any mainstream device. At least it’s going down the right road, and if AppSense doesn’t take it the whole distance, there’s now a model for someone else to try.

Almost everything else on the market perpetuates wasteful mobile/desktop separation and/or rigidly confined ecosystems — neither of which should be accepted.

This article, “A step closer to cleaning up the mobile cloud mess,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.