Open Letter from a Nomadesk User

Written by Sacha Vekeman

Sacha is a passionate technology marketeer, architect and founder of two UK start-ups and part-time management consultant working with CEO’s and Senior VPs at technology giants and high-tech start-ups in strategic marketing, business development, fundraising, visioneering and corporate development.

Sacha’s LinkedIn profile.

I am a gadget freak after having tested thousands pieces of software. I am always on the outlook for a software update, a completely new online service, or a beta release from a giant software maker.

Professionally I use software to increase my productivity. I am always looking for new tools that allow me to work more efficient, getting things done much faster and allowing me to communicate in a much more direct way. In a high-touch communicative world where individuals have 500 FaceBook friends, 1000 LinkedIn contacts and 3000 Twitter followers you need good technology.

I am very precise when testing and making new software part of my daily workflow. Also with Nomadesk I was cautious. I’ve waited until version 3 was released before installing and testing the software.  What I first noticed was the friendly graphics and light install in terms of size and download.

After a smooth install of Nomadesk in less than 5 minutes on a Windows Vista computer the first thing which surprised me was the exact, but deep integration into my windows filesystem. I also noticed the simplicity of only having to go through 3, maybe 4 steps to configure Nomadesk.

I am very organized, I don’t like search for my personal structure. Search is a tool that makes you forget order, structure and hierarchy. Having to think hard how to structure something doesn’t make you forget and creates meaning and purpose to your content, that’s why I was a serious user of the Microsoft My Documents folder.

My Documents folder was organized in such a way that I could easily see a decade of career behind me with about 30,000 files created. Thirty thousand files in about ten years; talk about being a knowledge worker.

This excludes my other private digital assets, such as pictures (about 15,000 since 2003) and music (about 24,000 mp3s since 2006). I am not into video, besides buying some DVDs, which I don’t copy electronically (not yet I guess).

After having tested Nomadesk on my home desktop and professional laptop for four weeks, I noticed how fast it all works! And I can tell you, speed is everything, certainly when you deal with an enormous set of files and folders. I don’t like things slow: a non responding Windows Explorer or a slowly opening Word file, it just ruins my day.

I soon upgraded my PC to Windows7 and decided to subscribe to the Nomadesk service, as I had re-think how I organize my files and folders. It’s time to tidy up, and organize myself for the future, the next decade, maybe half century, as I see myself still working on my computer at the age of 85, accessing files since I was 25. That’s over 60 years of files I intent to keep and preserve.

Having checked with the 24/7 support operations of Nomadesk if Windows7 was supported, I decided to go for it. Again a smooth install, new OS and a new filestructure. (Opportunity for Nomadesk, tie V3 around the launch of windows7 !!! When people upgrade their OS, they want to do things different).

Once Nomadesk was up and running I started to create team servers as following. For every company I work for I created a new team server. Why? Because I work as a consultant and want to offer a differentiating service to allow 24/7 access to all files I have created for my clients, by an easy sharing environment, but while not having to take the penalty of taking massive amounts of time to upload files individually, work directly in an online service such as google Apps (I am not always online, but like to work wherever I can) or using online/offline sharing tools that are slow, slow, and slow!!!

Setting up a Team Fileserver is easy, and allows you to create it as some kind of network drive. The capacity of the team server is serious, 106 GB, certainly more than enough as a company folder, as my rule of thumb in professional life is 5 years of work is 10 GB of data, or 2 GB per year; a lot of capacity available.

Also the scalability is nice. Just add another Team Fileserver or Personal Fileserver and you have another 100 GB at your disposal. This is a must, certainly in a massively digital world, where data storage is still at the heart of the digital economy, just having returned from a two-day StorageExpo exhibition.

The choice between a Team and Personal Fileserver is not a functionality choice, but a sharing choice. I don’t use personal servers as much yet as team servers, as everything I do in life, I want to share, even privately, hence the success of Facebook, Flickr or YouTube. Therefore, I also organize my family life with my wife around a Team Fileserver, allowing her to access my personal files and digital media over Nomadesk. She can even access my professional folders, in case something happens to me.