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Attachments.me links with Egnyte to boost enterprise appeal

The email attachment filing and sharing product now works with Egnyte's cloud file server, with new features in the pipeline.
Written by Toby Wolpe, Contributor
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Attachments.me is working on more powerful, automated filing rule creation

Attachments.me now integrates with the Egnyte hybrid cloud file-sharing service, in a move designed to improve the email productivity tool's enterprise credentials.

The Attachments.me service, which comes in the form of a Gmail extension for Chrome and Firefox and an iPhone app, is designed create order among email attachments and allow users to file them to the cloud.

"A lot of people use their email inbox as an additional data store — much like they use Dropbox or something else — and they actually depend on it for the attachment files in there. So our initial product was to help with that problem — to help them surface all the files in there,"  Attachments.me chief executive Jesse Miller said.

"But then we realised that times are changing and with the increased use of all these cloud stores, people are wanting to have the cloud be the de facto spot for their files."

Chrome and Firefox extensions

With the Chrome and Firefox extensions, when a user opens an email that has an attachment, Attachments.me appears on the sidebar and gives the option to save the attachment to the cloud storage service they stipulate. Attachments.me already integrates with Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft SkyDrive.

Users can create automatic filing rules so that, for example, all attachments contained in emails from a particular source can in future be saved to a specific cloud folder. Files can also be shared, tracked and secured with passwords.

"We see ourselves as still enabling email as the de facto way that people exchange files — because it really is still the predominant way that files are exchanged today — by giving people access to that cloud storage while they're in that email flow," Miller said.

According to Miller, the Egnyte integration is a logical step given both companies' involvement in Google products.

"Egnyte has got a lot of really large Google Apps domains. I think that's why they ended up doing some of the Google Docs integration that they did, so it's a really good fit for us since we're specifically for Gmail and Google Apps right now exclusively and we're trying to move more into the enterprise," he said.

"The main thing this [integration] is giving you is access to Egnyte right where you work — which for a lot of people is email all day — giving you access to your Egnyte files while you're composing emails, so that you can quickly share them but then also giving you quick ways to get the files you're receiving back up into Egnyte."

More powerful filing rule creation

Attachments.me is working on more powerful filing rule creation, featuring automation to avoid having to create multiple rules for the same sender manually.

"Now rules are created on, say, document type received, senders, subject and file names and let people filter but it's fairly manual. But these new ones are looking back at what people have done with the rules and giving them ways to automate things they see happening over and over," he said.

The new as yet unreleased features are designed to appeal to vertical sectors, such as the law and real estate.

"They can infer the client name based on the domain of the email that's being sent, and they can create a single rule and date stamp at the very start of their files, so that they can have multiple copies of the attachment without having to depend on Dropbox's versioning, for example," Miller said.

Attachments.me has also improved its iPhone app, with a revamped user interface, faster sorting and searching of attachments, and improved emailing of files in bulk from multiple folders and cloud storage services.

Further reading on Attachments.me and Egnyte

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