According to the release sent yesterday, the hottest companies must be in either the Software, Wireless, Internet, or Media industry and be a privately held organization, and be within the districts/states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Ohio, or Wisconsin.

DataSync joins other reputable companies in our region including ChaCha search engine and  Groupon daily deals. Click here to a full list of the hottest companies in the Midwest. Congrats to DataSync and all the other winners!

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.

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.

• Add/Edit/Remove Users
• Change Passwords
• Add/Remove Extension Rights

DataSync Suite Admin Tutorial

Questions?
If you have questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to contact us with your feedback.

DataSync

Vetter seized every opportunity to talk with industry leaders and gained valuable insight as well as created further awareness of the flagship product, DataSync Suite. Click here to read about his personal experience.

Notable Items:

• CEOs in Attendance – Jim Whitehurst of Red Hat, Ron Hovsepian of Novell, and Jonothan Schwartz of Sun, who discussed their personal open source software vision and direction.
• Standout Session – Mike Olson of Cloudera. A former executive at Oracle, Olson candidly shared his philosophy on how to build better software.
  
• Cloud/ROI – Cloud will enable open source to be deployed quickly and inexpensively. DataSync will continue to move in this direction as well, as the ROI/value message is very strong. In hard economic times, open source software is fast becoming an attractive option.

Coming up, DataSync will present at Ignite Minneapolis and at the first annual South Dakota BarCamp. If you’re planning on attending either, please drop us a line.

Originally from Sioux Falls, SD, Steve has been hacking on open source applications (mostly in PHP) at the information technology powerhouse, IBM, since 2000. His experience includes working from the Linux Technology Center, running a sourceforge.net type site and contributing to the libhugetlbfs virtual memory performance library.

When asked what drew him to software engineering, Steve said, “I’ve been an open-source junkie for 10 years. I love being able to fix or add new features to software that I rely on.”

Steve’s new role as Software Engineer at DataSync will focus on interface design and coding of DataSync’s flagship product, DataSync Suite, scheduled to release in Summer 2009. Steve also brings a wealth of knowledge and an innovative approach to open-source and will be a major contributor of the overall user experience.

In his spare time, Steve enjoys spending time with his wife, Carol, and their sons, Rilyn (8), Thomas (16), and Matthew (19) and eating spicy cheeses.

DataSync is extremely excited to add yet another top-level expert to the team.

Welcome, Steve!

Bloggers.
A couple of technology bloggers recently touted the DataSync Suite business model. Chris deVidal named DataSync Suite as a “fresh software alternative to Microsoft”. John Cow listed DataSync as one of three software consolidation industry leading alternatives.

Up and Coming.
DataSync CEO Mike Vetter was named a Top 10 Up and Comer by the Sioux Falls Business Journal. Congratulations, Mike.

Twitter.
We all have a bit of Twitter Fever. Thanks, @JWKirsch at the Argus Leader for the write-up and @clickrain for hosting the “first evuh” Sioux Falls TweetUp. We plan on attending the next TweetUp in April. Oh, and follow us: @datasync.

Want to learn more?

Sign up for a Free Trial.
Talk to an Expert.
Visit the DataSync Community.

Looking for hosted software services?

Click here to learn more.

Here are the details:

New Features/Enhancements.

• Menu bar drop-downs now disappear upon moving the mouse away.
• The suite processes now automatically drop to a non-privileged system user.

Bug Fixes.

• Emails can now be archived if containing the CC line.
• Access level drop-down of the “Manage User Details” dialog is now being set correctly.

Learn more here.

Try DataSync Suite.
The public release of DataSync Suite 1.0 is set for this summer. In the meantime, please learn more or try the demo.

Learn More.
Find out more on our website by visiting the DataSync community and forums.

Questions?
If you have questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to contact us with your feedback.

Now it’s time to kick the tires around. Take a tour of the DataSync Suite and see for yourself how this product can benefit your company:

Questions?

Learn more about DataSync Suite.
Speak with one of our sales staff.
Contact us with your feedback.

Thanks for stopping by. Please check back soon for more news about the release of DataSync Suite 1.0.

We’re here to solve these problems, but sometimes the biggest problem is identifying that you have a problem to begin with.

We’ve created a video in which we discuss the benefits of consolidating your software with DataSync Suite in hopes that it will make a bit more sense:

Questions?

Learn more about DataSync Suite.
Speak with one of our sales staff.
Contact us with your feedback.

The third and final video in our series, “Demo DataSync Suite”, is coming tomorrow.