At Sync-U,™ you can get orientated with our software and learn how to get started with DataSync.

Gain access to step by step instructions in our video tutorials, articles, and FAQ’s on how to use each of our software applications.

Check out our courses and learn about topics such as how to log in to DataSync Suite™ or how to configure your BlackBerry to sync with Zimbra.

Don’t understand some of the technical terminology used in our applications? That’s okay. Now we have a glossary of words commonly used in our products to make sure you know what we’re talking about.

Have questions? Find answers. Check out Sync-U™ at www.datasyncsuite.com/syncu.

Our goal of simplifying your business’ software reflects in our new look and feel–it’s simple. We don’t want you to get bogged down with all the technical mumbo jumbo, just provide you with the information you need to get the job done.

Feel free to take a look around the new website, check out Sync-U, and then sign up to try out the free beta of DataSync Suite.™

My name is Kristen Pittenger and I will serve as Marketing Coordinator for the company. I will focus on our online marketing efforts as well as writing and updating the blog.

I am a graduate of Augustana College, and I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in Business/Communications and French. My previous experience includes marketing positions with Lawrence and Schiller as well as SDN Communications.

I enjoy all things music–this summer you will probably find me at many summer concerts, traveling, reading, dabbling in photography, and spending time with my family and friends. 

I’m excited to join a dedicated team, and I’m looking forward to continue to update the blog.

We are all excited to send him off on his honeymoon, and are considering disabling his Blackberry on the BES to ensure he doesn’t even think about thinking about work.

Congrats Wyatt! You’ve now accomplished what many n00bs never do: you’ve found love!

From the article:

Software shouldn’t be so hard. You shouldn’t have to hire a full time  IT guy to (sort of) figure this stuff out for you. It should be  available inexpensively, and it should be integrated out of the box.

This is the problem we’re solving at DataSync. We’re really doing 2  things:

1. Making software inexpensive and easy to access. We do this by  delivering everything to our customers’ web browser as an inexpensive  service. No more expensive updates that break your computer, no more  “the server is down today”. The industry buzzwords for this are SaaS  or cloud computing.

2. Consolidating - We’re building a great software tool that  eliminates manually entering the same information into multiple  software packages. This means if you put a contact in one system,  it’ll synchronize to all your systems. The same goes for other types  of business information. There’s a bunch of different industry  buzzwords for this, but they all boil down to consolidation.”

DataSync is working hard on our 1.0 release, scheduled for this  summer, which will eliminate some important redundancy that exists  today. We’re focused initially on synchronizing email, contacts, and  tasks between Zimbra and SugarCRM. We think there’s a lot of benefits  to doing that, and it’s a good start on a long list of key pieces of  information that we’ll be working on consolidating with DataSync Suite.

By using open source software products on SaaS providers’ platforms who offer direct access to the code, one can avoid this lack of freedom as Stallman suggests, but also maintain the freedom from having to maintain one’s own servers.

Indeed, DataSync does offer code-level access to our PHP-driven applications, giving our customers full control over their code. Open source driven SaaS gives customers access to high availability systems and dedicated support personnel without the massive upfront and ongoing costs. If code-level access is given, they retain 100% control over their code. The downside? No sleepless nights troubleshooting servers. Before we made delivering great hosting our business, we were in the same boat. Then, we decided it didn’t have to be that way. That’s how the DataSync On-Demand idea was born. It just made sense.

On the technical side, DataSync runs HP hardware running VMWare ESX server, with Cannonical Ubuntu linux powering the applications DataSync delivers. Our fibre channel SAN delivers terabytes of fast storage to our infrastructure, making data access fast and archiving flexible.

We’re committed to managing our hosting systems with industry-accepted best practices that ensure fast, reliable, and available applications. Our new hosting infrastructure provides the uptime we require and helps us minimize required maintenance windows, delivering the reliability that only a large, supported infrastructure can provide. Here’s what a customer recently had to say about our hosting services:

Your full team is top notch and we greatly value the DataSync services that we use daily.  We look forward to years of use and expansion of our services.

- Rick Zobel, Immersive Display Solutions

All new customers are now set up in the new infrastructure, so if you’re thinking about moving to DataSync, now is the time. Existing customers are currently being migrated over to the new system (we’ve already moved 75% of our existing customers), a process that will be completed in May.

If you have additional questions about our hosting infrastructure please don’t hesitate to contact our Network Operations Center (NOC) for more information at noc@datasyncorp.com. Our NOC team exists to build the most reliable, scalable hosting platform in the business. With our new hosting system, we’ve done that. You won’t find a better managed open source hosting platform out there.

To learn more about DataSync On-Demand, visit our website.

I recently came across an outstanding article by Keith Dawson in NewsFactor, who works in the contact center industry. After doing a lot of evaluating, he came to this conclusion:

Empirically, we have more than 20 years of evidence that shows that premise based technologies (by themselves) manifestly do not solve these structural endemic problems. It may be the case that removing technology management from the contact center’s daily experience provides the window of opportunity to actually deal with those business processes. After all, creating workflows and managing people are what centers are genuinely good at. An argument can be made that hosting may be the next great transformative leap that allows contact centers to really engage with their employees and customers and leave handling the switch or the software to someone else.

However, hosting is not for everyone. Hosting is great for smaller deployments:

Deploying hosted technology is not a binary, all or nothing choice. With certain technologies you can start small and gradually move upscale, depending on your needs. Of course, if you don’t know how large you might need to grow, you may end up on the wrong side of the cost equation when you eventually do expand capacity.

The greatest advantage of hosting is often cost. In our case we can host your software for far less than most internal IT departments. Here’s what Keith noted:

Why are you considering off-premising in the first place? Is it because you want to try something you’re not currently using? Or because you need to grow/ shrink/cut costs? The key to making this decision successful is knowing whether you are looking at hosting/ leasing as a transition, or as a permanent shift in how you use technology.

The bottom line is that your organization needs to do cost/benefit before deciding on hosting applications. If you decide that hosting is right for your firm, we’d love to provide the service!

New Features Include:

• Compose message has been moved to a tab - you can compose a message, flip to another tab, and come back to the compose tab without saving as draft
• The ability to run new mail filters over existing mail folders
• A new share discovery interface that shows shares that are available to you as well as shares that are created for your account

• Zimlet management for allowed Zimlets in the Preferences tab of the web client
• Ability to attach documents to an email directly from the Briefcase
• IM moved from a tab along the top to the bottom
• Per-user blacklists and whitelists right from within the Preferences tab of the web client

• A horizontal “three panel” view with the message tab on the right.
• Tabs for individual messages as well as the compose page.
• Document & Briefcase access from the standard HTML client.
• Share management & discovery UI that lets you see all shares (email, contacts, calendar, tasks, docs, etc) at a glance. Join a distribution list late? Find all existing shares with the group.
• The ability to run existing email filters over the contents of a folder.
• Did you get it? Know instantly, as read receipts have been implemented in the web-client.
• Improved calendar resource auto-accept/decline conflict handling.
• Calendar fisheye view - previously in Zimbra Desktop, now in ZCS.
• Auto-updating RSS feeds & ICS event URLs on a configurable schedule.
• Per-user blacklists & whitelists are exposed in the revamped mail preferences area.
• ‘Published’ Zimlets management for end users in options. (Zimlets themselves can now define a new application or preferences tab.)
• Mobile web-client overhauls: Including a special mini logon page, better appointment creation, and six new variants based on device type and connection speed.
• Auto-complete from shared address books; and recently used contacts are presented first.
• Configurable spell check on every send.
• On-behalf-of aka sendAs option on compose in shared folders/relationship accounts.
• OpenLDAP now allows for some on-the-fly configuration changes with zmlocalconfig via a cn=config backend instead of slapd.conf text files for preservation across upgrades.
• Role based delegated permissions on every individual feature. Now you can create distribution list managers, while HSP’s can give someone permission to manage multiple domains from one login. (Available in both network and open source editions - the network edition will include easy admin console configuration.)

For a longer list of new features, click here.

Questions? Contact us.

DataSync offers Zimbra Collaboration Suite hosting, which includes a robust mix of collaboration tools such as email, group calendaring, contacts, task management, advanced search, IM, file storage, zimlets and web document management and authoring. This robust feature set far exceeds the standard mail client, which arguably is better than Microsoft Exchange.

Here are a few useful Zimbra usage tips for both keyboard and mail folder shortcuts for the composition and management of your email that can help save a bit of time during a busy work day.

First, log in to the Zimbra Collaborative Suite (ZCS) and proceed to the Preferences pane.

Next, select the Shortcuts pane.

Here you will see four shortcuts options.

• Shortcut List: Acts as a “key” for both keyboard shortcuts and for all Zimbra applications and features.
• Mail Folder Shortcuts: Set custom key strokes to move email from folder to folder.
• Saved Search Shortcuts: Assigns numeric shortcuts to Saved Searches for quick access.
• Tag Shortcuts: Assigns numbers to specific tags allowing you to search for messages with the corresponding tag.

Email Compose window:

• “c” or “n” - compose new mail in main browser window
• “C” - compose new in external window
• “r” - reply to sender
• “a” - reply to all recipients
• “f” - forward message
• “ctrl + s” - send message

Email navigation:

• “Delete” key - deletes the email by moving it to the Trash folder
• “j” - move up one message in the queue
• “k” - move down one message in the queue

Navigation between applications:

• “i” - return to mail from another application such as Calendaring or Tasks
• “g + a” - go to Address Book from another pane
• “g + c” - go to Calendar from another pane
• “g + d” - go to Briefcase from another pane
• “g + m” - go to Mail from another pane
• “g + p” - go to Preferences from another pane
• “g + t” - go to Tasks from another pane

Mail Folder Shortcuts:

• “.  + 2″ - office email archive
• “.  + 1″ - personal email archive

We hope this helps familiarize Zimbra users with the powerful interface the software provides. If you have questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to contact us or visit our community page.