We have often been asked what is the difference between dropbox and digitalbucket.net? The simple answer is Features. The best way to learn about a product and its features is to understand who is using it and what they’re trying to accomplish. Each product serves a unique purpose.

Dropbox is ideal for individuals who require a setup-and-forget solution for online file storage, file synchronization, mobile access and basic file sharing.

For serious business use and collaboration however, digitalbucket.net is the better choice with better Document Management tools, File Tracking Reports, Data Profiling, Email Notification Updates, Sharing and Collaboration capabilities.

Digitalbucket.net offers a lot more enterprise features for account administrators such as granular permissions, role based access, team management, group permissions. It also provides great productivity features like file content search, file tagging, Salesforce.com and Google apps integration. Digitalbucket.net has a built in viewer for the most common file types which Dropbox lacks.

Here is a chart that compares the two products side by side.

To help protect your organization's data against unauthorized access, you have options for setting login restrictions.

These two new options in the security section of the Account Management will allows you to you can define IP address ranges to ban or allow user(s) from accessing digitalbucket.net.

Trusted IP Address Ranges

Account administrators can set IP address ranges from which all the account users can log in without receiving a login error messages. If IP address restrictions are defined, any login from an unregistered IP address is denied, and any login from a valid IP address is allowed.

Device Identity Confirmation

If Device Identity Confirmation option is selected, digitalbucket.net checks whether the user is logging in from an IP address they have not been used before. If the user's login is from a browser that includes a digitalbucket.net cookie, the login is allowed. The browser will have the digitalbucket.net cookie if the user has previously used that browser to log in to digitalbucket.net.

For access via the user interface, the user is prompted to activate his or her account. An activation email will be sent to the address specified on the user's account email address. The email instructs the user to click on the Activate link in their browser to activate their computer for logging in to digitalbucket.net.

Please share your stories – as well as comments and questions – here..

You can now embed your folders anywhere on the web – in blogs, wikis and websites. This is a flexible and easy way to display your folder content right in the browser.

To take this feature for a spin, just right click on a folder that you’d like to embed and select “Get Download Widget...” option from the popup menu. In the dialog, you can select the width and height of your widget. Copy the script and paste it in your website or blog and you’re good to go! Only Account Administrator can generate the embed scripts.

Have you ever wanted to quickly dive into your Digitalbucket.net account from your iPad or iPhone and tweak a document using an editor such as iWork Pages? It’s easy – all you need is a Digitalbucket.net Business account and the latest version of the iWork apps. The iWork apps are some of the best apps for iPad or iPhone, and each show just how powerful a touchscreen device can be for creating and editing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

You can import any document from your Digitalbucket.net account by using the + button at the top left of an iWork app, and clicking WebDAV. Simply enter http://dav.digitalbucket.net into the server address, and then enter your Digitalbucket.net username and password:

Now, the app will connect to your digitalbucket.net account. Seconds later, you’ll see all of your folders listed. Browse to the file you want to edit, and then tap it to download the file to your device.

Here’s the format that each iWork app supports, from the Apple iWork for iPad support site:

iWork App    Importable File Types
Keynote    .key    .ppt    .pptx    .pps    .ppsx    ---    ---    ---
Pages    .pages    .doc    .docx    .dotx    .txt    ---    ---    ---
Numbers    .numbers    .xls    .xlsx    .xlt    .xltx    .xlsm    .xla    .csv

Most files open great once they are imported, though you may see warnings about any parts of the documents that aren’t supported. You may have to tweak documents a bit to work best across platforms, but for the most part it’s seamless working with documents from any common Office app.
When you’re done editing simply click on the tools button at the top right of the screen and select Share and Print. You’ll see Copy to WebDAV option. Select where you want to save the file back to your Digitalbucket.net, and click on Done. Your iWork app will then convert your document to the correct format and upload it to the server.

Once it’s uploaded, though, it is instantly accessible from anywhere using a range of supported interfaces such as a web browser, mapped drive, and mobile devices.

And that’s it! Your updated file will be saved back to your Digitalbucket.net account, synced between all of your PCs and available from anywhere.

It’s amazing how Smart phones and Tablets have accelerated the pace of Businesses faster than any other technology. One of the best things about storing your photos, music, videos and documents with digitalbucket.net is the ability to access them from anywhere – and especially from your phone when you’re on the move.

Even with all these great technologies, keeping up the way you work on your Laptop, on your Smart Phone on your Tablet is still a challenge. It is impossible to keep it all straight.

Introducing touch.digitalbucket.net

It is one app, whether you are using an iPhone, BlackBerry, iPad, Andriod, It works seamlessly across all your devices with all your data.

Log in with your digitalbucket.net account credentials and you’ll find yourself in a small, sleek version of your digitalbucket.net portal. You can browse your folders, view files or send files.

You can view PDF, Office Documents, and images right from within the app. Other files can be downloaded and opened from within apps that you’ve installed on your device.

Do you regularly use our mobile web portal? Do you have particular features or improvements that you’d like to see in future? Please send us an email support@digitalbucket.net and let us know.

Overview

In digitalbucket.net context, metadata is data about your documents. These can be any information that describes the attributes of documents. By default digitalbucket.net captures certain metadata such as document name, document type, last modified date etc. These properties are automatically displayed in File Manager.

Metadata displays as columns

Often you can decide what additional metadata might be needed by thinking about how you want to organize your documents – for instance for search, workflow or retention. If you want to use metadata for search, think about what type of metadata you will need that will assist you to find files faster. For example, you may want to know if the document belongs to a specific Department or a Person. In this case you may want to create metadata category based on ‘Department”. You can then enter any relevant department names (e.g. Marketing, Engineering, etc) and sort document accordingly.

How to create new columns?

Only account administrators can modify the File Manager’s columns and add/remove new file properties. The newly modified view is displayed to the all the users when they login. Users with Full Control permission are allowed to edit values of these properties.
To create new file properties, follow the steps below.
1-    Sign into your administrator account.
2-    In your account’s desktop, click on the Account Manager.
3-    Click on the Manager File Properties on the left hand side.
4-    Add new file properties.
5-    Save and Reload the File Manager.

After the page reload, custom columns will appear and represent organization specific empty columns. There is no limit to the columns one can create for a document.

How to assign values (metadata) to your columns?

To assign values or metadata to the newly created columns, select file(s) and right click (Ctrl+click in Mac) and choose Properties from the popup menu.

In the Properties dialog, click on the Properties tab and enter your metadata and hit ok. The new metadata will be displayed in the File Manager.

For more information, contact our sales team at sales@digitalbucket.net or call 1-866-866-6343.

With digitalbucket.net Directory Services, organizations can easily transition their users over to digitalbucket.net. Instead of having to create sub-accounts for your users, you can push user accounts from your existing LDAP server to the digitalbucket.net account.

Many companies use a central LDAP database to manage user identities. By delegating digitalbucket.net authentication to this system, when a user is removed from the LDAP system, they can no longer access digitalbucket.net. Consequently, users who leave the company, automatically lose access to company data after their departure.

We are happy to announce the ability to provision users from your own internal directory services be it Active Directory, Lotus Domino or another LDAP solution with your digitalbucket.net.

We provide an interface that extracts user records and related metadata from your directory service into the digitalbucket.net account. You can automatically load a subset or all users into your digitalbucket.net account. Furthermore as new users are created, or users leaving the company are deactivated within your directory service, your account will be kept in sync with these changes.

Digitalbucket.net also allows mixed mode authentication, where some users are authenticated from your directory service and others are authenticated from the digitalbucket.net services. For example, assume you only have employee records set up in your directory service. You plan to use digitalbucket.net for file sharing between your employees and business partners. Since the business partner user data is not a part of the directory service, you can set up digitalbucket.net to authenticate all your employees against your directory service, and all business partners against the digitalbucket.net services.

For more information regarding Directory Services and exact implementation steps, please contact us.

Overview

Digitalbucket.net when combined with Google Apps allows users to take advantage of a simple, user-intuitive cloud based solution to share and collaborate on-line. The uses are truly limitless. Business users can communicate with their team, manage work and get things done effortlessly. They can reduce costs and increase productivity by combining the content management, collaboration and communication platforms on the cloud.

How to connect your Account to Google Apps domain?

To ensure a proper integration, you will need to add digitalbucket.net application to your Google Apps domain from the Google Apps Marketplace. In order to implement Single Sign On between 2 services, you will need a digitalbucket.net Business or Enterprise account.

To add digitalbucket.net to your Google Apps account, follow the following steps.

Step1. Find digitalbucket.net in the Google Marketplace and select “Add it now”.

Step 2. Agree to our Terms of Service.

Step 3. Grant Data Access for our APIs to access Google Apps' APIs.

Step 4- Click on the Enable app now button.

Once you hit the Enable app now button, the digitalbucket.net application integration with Google Apps will complete. The application’s navigation link may take 24 hours to appear.

When the app is enabled, you should see the digitalbucket.net application navigation link in the “more” drop down menu.

How do users connect Google Apps to their digitalbucket.net accounts (Single Sign On)?

At this point, you should have admin access to a domain on Google Apps. Next, you will want to connect your Google account to digitalbucket.net.

Log into the Google Apps account as admin, and select “more” menu (picture above) and select digitalbucket.net app. The first time any user comes here from Google, he/she will be prompted to log into an existing account, or create a new account.

new account. After successful login, each time you select digitalbucket.net from the more menu in Google Apps, you will automatically login to your digitalbucket.net account.

How to connect Google Apps users to digitalbucket.net sub-account?

While you are logged in as digitalbucket.net account administrator, click on the Account Manager icon. This will bring up a dialog where you can setup your account to meet your needs. One of the options on the left hand side is Google Apps Integration. Click on the link and you will see a page like this.

This is the page where you can “map” your sub-account to Google Apps user. By mapping users, your Google Apps users will have seamless access to their digitalbucket.net sub-accounts. Fill out the users and save changes.

How to access my Google Docs from digitalbucket.net?

It’s easy. Double Click on the Google Docs browser and you will have access to your files.

Simply drag and drop files from Google Docs to your digitalbucke.net File Manager or Vice Versa. Double clicking on the files on Google Docs Browser will open them for edit or preview depending on the file type.

It is also possible to send files from your digitalbucket.net File Manager to your Google Apps Gmail and Calendar apps. Right Click on a file and select Send to option. See picture below.

For more information, contact our sales team at sales@digitalbucket.net or call 1-866-866-6343.

A common way to move or copy a file in Windows or Mac is to select it and drag and drop it to another location. What if we could do the same with Web Browsers?

We’re excited to announce that “drag and drop” is now integrated into digitalbucket.net and it is available for Firefox 3.6+, Safari 4+ and Chrome 6+.

This new feature solves one of the most common complaints from web app users — why can’t I just drag and drop files like I do everywhere else? Well, thanks to the new APIs in HTML5, now you can.

Digitalbucket.net continues to use HTML5 to push its web application into the future. The latest bit of HTML5 is drag-and-drop support, which is now a standard part of the File Manager.

If you’re using Google Chrome 4 or Firefox 3.6, you can now simply drag a file from your desktop into the File Manager.

To see drag-and-drop in action, just grab files off your desktop and drag it into the digitalbucket.net File Manager. The list view area will change to say “Drop files here.” Drop the file in the target area and it will automatically be uploaded to your account.

If you frequently receive a large number of email attachments, it can be difficult to manage them. You can save them to your hard drive and then upload them to digitalbucket.net; however, this can take several steps. We’ve launched a new feature that will assist you easily upload files using your email application to digitalbucket.net.

Our new “folder email address” feature lets you and your contacts email files as attachments directly to the digitalbucket.net folder of your choice. To get started, simply right click on a folder, and select Email Files to this folder from the menu. You’ll be provided with a unique email address.

The folder email address begins with the folder name followed by a unique identifier. >This naming convention will help you to memorize the uploaded files destination and take advantage of auto-complete features available in many email applications. You can share the email address with your contacts, making it easy for them to upload files to your specified folders, regardless of whether they have a digitalbucket.net account.

If necessary, you can disable the email by clicking on the Disable button.

This feature can be used in interesting ways:

• Create Folders with your colleagues, vendors, partners’ names and share the folder email address with them to send files into your digitalbucket.net folders.
• Cc folder email address in an email thread to upload your project documents into your digitalbucket.net Project folder.
• Use the folder email address to automatically email scanned files directly into a digitalbucket.net folder.

Hope you like this useful feather and we’d love to hear your feedback.