Collaboration for File Systems

GOAL: Facilitate high availability, collaboration, and backup among branch office users, by providing unobtrusive real-time mirroring and locking of files.

As companies expand and open new office locations, the requirement for efficient inter-office collaboration becomes increasingly important to ensure that geographic distance does not become an inhibitor of growth. One important aspect of this effort is to ensure that data is quickly available for any employee wherever they need it, regardless of whether they are in the headquarter office or a branch office location.

File mirroring solutions have thus been deployed to provide for employee file sharing. This mechanism is generally far more efficient than emailing files back and forth, especially if the files are large in size.

However, standard file mirroring solutions generally lack a central feature important for a collaborative environment where inter-office file servers are mirrored and data is shared: File Locking.

Without integrated file locking, mirrored file servers expose live documents to version conflicts. That is, a colleague in Office A can open and edit a document at the same time a colleague in Office B is working on the same document. In such a scenario, standard file mirroring solutions will only save the changes made by the person closing the file last.

Peer Solution's Benefits

The surest and simplest way of eliminating version conflicts with any file mirroring solution is to add a true file locking solution - one that offers, at a minimum, real-time detection of file use and immediate remote locking. This assures that when a file is open at location A, all other versions - say local copies at various branch offices - are locked down, preventing anyone from opening and revising it. When the file closes, the file lock is immediately released and ready for synchronization.

Our complete PEER Collaboration Package offers both real-time file locking AND real-time replication, thus eliminating version conflict and providing a fail-safe collaborative framework.

Download an evaluation today to gain these benefits:

• Transparent file locking among N number of geographical office branches/Servers
• Cross Domain File Locking and File Copy
• Real-Time File Locking and File Transfers among Servers
• Multi-Threaded File Locking, File Release and File Propagation

Requirements

• All systems must be Windows based file servers.
• The Peer Collaboration Package (i.e. PeerSync Server, PeerLock Server, and the PSListener agent) should be installed on each file server participating in the collaboration group.
• The servers must be able to see each other via UNC Path.
• Please do not try to test using Wordpad/ Notepad. These file types cannot be locked due to the nature of the application.
• PeerLock by default is set to be optimized for file servers. As such, files should be opened from desktops connecting to the file server; not locally on the file server through the Windows Explorer.