As more and more applications are enabled on mobile platforms, there is an ever increasing need to ensure that corporate IT and managers of workgroups have visibility over who accesses and makes changes to files. Historically there has been an emphasis on enabling mobile access, but a relative absence of focus on ensuring transparency over that access. FileTrek aims to remedy this with its new iPad management tool that is designed to track projects, data and individual user’s activity. A new offering that goes with FileTrek’s existing tracking products, the iPad product is available from today as a free addition for customers using Filetrek’s team and enterprise editions.
The product provides live activity updates of projects, and via a dashboard, displays how project files are related and how those files are being changed,all in real time.
Filetrek for iPad covers the following functional areas;
Access – With FileTrek for iPad, a worker in the field can access data through a tablet and have the same view of spreadsheets, presentations and memos as a manager in the company offices. Any existing FileTrek project or document that has been synced or shared can be added to the dashboard with a single click. There are no limits to the number of “favorite” projects, people and files that can be tracked.
Tracking Capabilities – FileTrek’s data tracking feature allows users to obtain a view of all activity within a workgroup or project, who has worked on it, and the various changes that have been made to it. The app provides access to the most recent versions. A file map tracks project dependencies and illustrates how files are related.
Event Feed – Receive live activity updates of all FileTrek projects, access and revisions. Visibility over sharing activity within a project, who has been added, who has been removed, information on what files have been reviewed, changed or removed.
MyPOV
FileTrek is a great feature, but it is just that, a feature. Other collaboration vendors either have this level of visibility or are certain to be planning to introduce it. Having this sort of tool as a third party application is a little counter-productive as it adds another step, and potential problem area, into the mix. The user experience is a little bit of a mishmash of consumer apps (Apple’s CoverFlow anyone) and more enterprise approaches. For all of these reasons the existence of FileTrek identifies a real need in the marketplace, but is essentially something that will be provided as core functionality by the collaboration vendors themselves.
