Web Worker Daily

There’s something about being a web worker that compels us to try to do more and more with less and less. Sure, you can manage your entire professional life from your laptop computer – but anyone can do that. The real question is, how much can you do from your mobile phone or PDA? The folks at Anywhere Together have some help for you here: with their Files Together Mobile Edition you can use your pocket-sized device to access files that are back on your desktop computer or home network. Upload, download, move, copy, make new folders; it’s essentially a file manager in your pocket. It will also build “one-time” download links so that you can be sitting in a customer’s office, browse to a file that you want them to have, and e-mail them a link that they can use to grab the file then and there.

Files Together Mobile Edition is a free add-on to the company’s flagship Files Together product (which is itself free for two users, and starts at $80 per user after that). PHP-based on the server side (and so easily installed on IIS or Apache), Files Together gives you a reasonably Web 2.0 view of your files in the browser, with user- and group-level security and full control over which drives and folders you expose over the wire. It uses Ajax on the client so you’ll need a relatively new browser but as a web worker you’ve already gone down that path anyway.

If you’ve got the sysadmin skills, you can think of other ways to handle these same tasks. For example, you could set up your own FTP server and manage users and folders for it, or use VNC or the equivalent to access your network remotely. What you’re paying for here (or getting for free, if you’re a small enough shop) is the convenience of having it all prepackaged with a turnkey install and easy point-and-click management screens. That’s a potential bargain if your business is something other than managing your computer network.