The Condrey Corp. Blog

DocXchanger in Education Spotlight

Dillon School District One is just one of more than 100 educational organizations that have deployed DocXchanger in the last five months. I recently visited their website and saw a “DocXchanger” link on the front page banner. I was intrigued, so I contacted Perry Ford, a Technology Coordinator at the district who was happy to share with me how they are using DocXchanger to address their “1 to 1 Laptop” program.

The objective of the program is to loan laptops to students and faculty so that they can continue to work on their projects that are stored on the district’s network servers.  Presently, the district loans over 200 laptops on a given night, but this number will be growing to around 400.

With hundreds of students and faculty members varying in technical expertise, the district wanted to make sure that network access to its servers was as simple as possible, and that’s where DocXchanger comes in. Access through DocXchanger is as simple as clicking the DocXchanger link and then entering the username and password. Once authenticated, DocXchanger, utilizing identity-based storage access properties in Novell eDirectory, quickly determines and grants network access to network storage areas over an HTTPS-based connection.

According to Perry, once authenticated, users generally download their work locally and when finished, upload the updated documents to the server. It’s a solution that has been remarkably successful since its inception at the beginning of the school year.

But network access is only one of the problems that DocXchanger is addressing. Perry also mentioned that the district will be using DocXchanger to eliminate the need for sending email attachments both internally and externally through the ability to create DocXchanger “sharing links” to network-stored content. Perry is hoping to introduce that feature in the second phase of the DocXchanger rollout this year.

Announcing File System Factory for Active Directory

Today, Condrey Corporation released File System Factory for Active Directory 2.5. If you’re familiar with Condrey Corporation’s history, “File System Factory” should sound familiar. Prior to our development and distribution deal with Novell, Condrey Corporation sold File System Factory—a name we trademarked—independently. With the Novell agreement, Novell sold the product as “Novell File System Factory,” but later renamed it to its presently-named “Novell Storage Manager.”

So why are we releasing a separate product that is essentially the same as Novell Storage Manager for Active Directory—a soon-to-be-available product in the Novell Storage Manager Support Pack 1? Perhaps the product FAQ summarizes it best: “For a variety of reasons, many customers running a Microsoft network environment cannot purchase the technology through Novell. These customers have both directly and indirectly requested alternative purchasing options for some time now. The business and economic environment we are living in dictates that we both acknowledge and honor these requests.”

As the FAQ also specifies, this release in no way diminishes our strategic partnership with Novell and we will continue to develop Novell Storage Manager, along with a new Novell-branded product to be released this year.

File System Factory for Active Directory automates the full lifecycle management of user network storage. Leveraging Microsoft Active Directory, File System Factory for AD automates a comprehensive set of storage management tasks based on events, identities and policies that you define for your organization. In the process File System Factory for AD can save you significant time and money.

Over the last few weeks, we have been presenting the product to an excited group of Condrey Corporation partners eager to offer the features and benefits of the only policy-based user storage management system empowered by Active Directory to their Microsoft customers.

We invite you to also learn about the product by visiting our product website, viewing the product demos, and downloading the product flyers and white paper.