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Egnyte, which specializes in adaptive enterprise file services, announced integrations for Microsoft Office 365, which are designed to enable business users to seamlessly access, manage, and share all of their files.
Web Access integration means users can open Egnyte files directly from Microsoft Office Online for viewing and editing, and changes are automatically saved back to Egnyte.
Mobile Access integration allows users who are on-the-go to remotely access and edit Egnyte files from any of the native Office Mobile Apps.
“Mobile tech has created a very fast pace environment that requires workers to always be on,” Isabelle Guis, Egnyte’s chief strategy officer, told eWEEK. “Therefore, it is important to provide secure access to information anywhere in the world, while also enabling secure sharing of that information.”
Guis said on average, the company sees 1.5 mobile devices per mobile Egnyte user and of that, 60 percent are smartphone users and 40 percent tablet users, yet 60 percent of actual usage is from tablet.
She explained this means that freedom of location is important but the form factor is also important–for content, a bigger screen means increased productivity.
“User friendliness is critical for adoption. If IT deploys a solution and it is not widely adopted by the users, then they did not accomplish their mission to increase productivity. If you are not user- friendly, users will stay on their shadow IT solution,” Guis said. “So, you have two options. First, have a solution that integrates with what is already adopted. Second, have a user-friendly solution that works better than others – this is why we have hybrid, so users can have access to all content–including the one on-premises–from a single solution.”
Desktop Access provides integration within all of the Office tools to offer users a variety of choices to open, edit, and share any of their Egnyte files.
Egnyte also announced the launch of its Technology Partner Program, providing enhanced value-added services on top of their open, hybrid technology, which leverages existing infrastructure on premises, in the cloud, or a mixture of both.
Professional services and support provides partners with collaborative development, and customers with deployment, along with the help needed to increase business user productivity and mitigate any downtime.
“The program was first grown organically based on customer demand to integrate with existing solutions in their ecosystem to make Egnyte more user friendly,” Guis said. “Once we reached 50 to 70 partners, we realized that we could do more than development and have a more proactive outreach to integrate with new solutions. This would allow us to add new features and partners in adjacent markets to file sync and share, to improve user experience, and to facilitate adoption. It also allows for protecting past IT investments and removing content silos between solutions.”