Sharpcast’s SugarSync, an application that synchronizes data across desktop computers, laptops, mobile phones, and even televisions, is rolling out a service designed specifically for businesses. As people split up their digital lives across devices and the Web, allows you to back-up any kind of digital file, including videos, spreadsheets, photos and documents, in the cloud and access it from virtually anywhere via a variety of devices. You can read our past reviews of SugarSync here and here.
SugarSync for Business, which is specifically designed for small businesses, lets enterprise users sync data across computers and smartphones syncing capabilities, share folders and collaborate with employees within its platform. The version allows administrators to create account for many users, where employees share the storage amount, but each employee has a separate user account (the employee’s data is not shared with other employees). Admins can set storage limits for each user and also receives alerts when user is near limit. And it’s easy to delete a user account without losing the data that’s in the account.
Of course, one of the draws for the business is that ability scale large data storage easily and quickly through a simple interface. Because it is cloud based, SugarSync can provide this to businesses for affordable prices. The base plan starts at $29.99/month for 100 GB and 3 users. Additional users can be added for $9.99/month and more storage can be added in 100 GB increments for $29.99/month. The services also offers free phone-based customer support.
Similar to its consumer product, SugarSync for Business supports computer and smartphone operating systems, including Windows, Mac, iPhone, Blackberry, and Android. SugarSync has already tested in small businesses and is especially popular with graphic designers, law firms, real estate offices and other service-oriented companies with data-intensive environments.
SugarSync for Business also features some of the innovative functionality of its consumer product, including the ability to share files with anyone in their Gmail, Hotmail, AOL or Yahoo Mail contact lists. Users will also be able to directly upload photos stored in SugarSync to Facebook, with functionality for additional social networks to be rolled out in the near future.
SugarSync faces competition from Windows Live Mesh from Microsoft, which won a Crunchie for best technology innovation earlier this year. Startups Dropbox, Box.net and Mozy also provide popular storage services in the cloud.
you can tell this isn’t a cut & pasted press release because it’s so badly written
I hate feeding the trolls but, is there some sort of banhammer for people like this? Half the fun of Techcrunch is the quality of the comments from other startup CEOs and technologist but over the past few months the grammar nazi’s are becoming unbearable.
heheheheh, I agree James
I really wanted to like SugarSync, but it’s way too unreliable. There’s a reason everybody uses DropBox. Although it’s annoying that you have to move your files into the DropBox, you can trust that they are safe once they are there. It syncs effortlessly and instantly, and it’s the only sync solution I’ve tried that hasn’t crapped out on me.
My only complaint about dropbox is the way they share URL download links. waiting for a 300 MB file to download in your browser is less than ideal.
Ditto to the above posts. SugarSync is decent and all, but where is the link to DropBox in this article? They would be SugarSync’s main rivals and I know plenty of small businesses that use them – most notably media houses and PR firms.
Interesting development in syncing files.
ps. Last sentence has html errors and seems to be missing a dropbox link.
This would a great service if it was to work. Their support is terrible.
They seem to ignore all email and forum support. This was as a paid customer.
Overall they have a great idea, just terrible company.
Stay clear if you want an actual backup / sync service.
Their Mac client is terrible. They don’t have a Linux client (they’ve been promising it for a long).
Awful bandwidth, data transfer rates.
I moved to Dropbox which I’ve not had any problem with.
A shame about SugarSync as I liked the more advanced features they have.
I don’t get the pricing. I can do $4.99 a month for 30Gb. So if I gave 10 people in my business their own personal account its 300Gb at $49.90 a month. Under this business account I’d have to pay like $160.
And as far as I can make out the only feature I’m paying for is the ability to manage their accounts through a dashboard?
No way I’d pay that amount.
One of our top rated online backup, storage, sharing and syncing services. Not the least expensive, but really seems to have the most complete package of features. Even has iPhone support now.
We like and use it, and it has been very reliable, and very easy to use, move, share and restore files.
As a user of the personal version, I cannot recommend this service at all. Their sync capability has seriously degraded over the year+ that I’ve had the service and they STILL don’t do network based sync points. Plus their only support help consists of a rote script that says to uninstall and reinstall their sync manager. POS service and software. Totally not worth it. I’m planning to move to DropBox.
I’ve been a paid personal Sugarsynch user for 2 years and have found it to be rock solid. Don’t know about their support because I’ve never had to use it. Very slick and seemless synching across multiple boxes , real time. Glad to see a biz level offering.
I have been paying for and using Sugarsynch for over a year and I love it. Cheap, never any problems, and automatic.
Anybody had any experience with Syncplicity? I use Dropbox at the moment – the reliability is great – the functionality, however, is not as great as what other services offer. Thoughts appreciated.
Get an extra 256 Mb on a free 2 Gb Mozy Home account by using the link:
https://mozy.com/?code=D685JF
I use SugarSync for years now and I never had any problems so far… reliable and fast syncing. And I like the way I can access all my data from any device. Even sharing folders or documents works great.
But I do have to admit that I never used the support… so no experience with that.
Service has great features but they should worry about making sure their consumer product works first before introducing a business product.
I’m a paid customer of their consumer product and for the last couple of months have been having problems with files just sitting there and not syncing.
For a company that has gotten $25M in funding, they have the worst support I have ever seen. Like someone said, their support consists of them telling you to uninstall and reinstall (which doesn’t solve anything by the way).
For the Dropbox folks, you don’t have to move individual files into the dropbox directory, you can use symlinks (where supported) to the directories you want shared.
Addendum: Be sure to put the symlink on any downstream computers…
This is great news! I can get my whole team on it now. I have been using it myself for about a year and I love this product. I could not go around without it anymore.
This baffles me. I’ve used Sugarsync for over a year (paid) and recently upgraded my account several months back. I’ve had such a good experience with Sugarsync I referred all my friends and colleagues to them and championed how their service would improve their workflow on-the-go, productivity, data security and more – way before they came up with their referral scheme and free 2gb plan.
But the past 2 months have been -utterly- dreadful. And no, I’m not referring to their poor support, that which is publicly and privately (within their forums) known.
Sugarsync did one thing right before everything went downhill. They decided to have a free 2gb plan. I always thought that, Sugarsync had the best feature-set, better than any of their competitors. They were also quick to implement new features. Yet, few sites or users talked about Sugarsync. In its place, Syncplicity and Dropbox were often mentioned. I reckon that a free plan was really what they needed to do, to get users at their doorstep and trying their product out.
I guess their free plan was so good they were overwhelmed. Sugarsync decided that a month back (i think), they needed to do urgent infrastructure upgrades to keep up with their growth. They went ahead with it. *Without* notifying any of their customers. Their service went down for over a day and was inaccessible or non-functional for several days after. Subsequently, they decided to make an announcement on their internal users website. They also made a blog post *after* all this happened. This highlights just one episode of bad customer service.
The worse thing is, they didn’t seem to think they did anything wrong. The official word was, we did tell you in the internal site and via the blog post that we were going to do maintenance. Do they expect their -paid- users to check their internal site and blog daily? What happened to email? They obviously don’t care about us, or how their downtime may have affected our business. Till now, there has been no word from the Sugarsync/Sharpcast team about this.
Yet, there are many other nagging issues that Sugarsync users have to deal with.
(1) They don’t listen to their users. (Dropbox does this very very well)
(2) Data security does not seem to permeate every decision that Sugarsync team makes. (Besides the usual data encryption) One of the most popular threads within the forum is about -security-, that anyone with access to their computers can access all their other files stored on their servers. The simple workaround was an option to logout or to allow users to request a login/password whenever the Sugarsync client is first accessed. Or the fact that the Sugarsync iPhone app should timeout after a while. Till date, no action. Even subtle things like the default action to save your login credentials when logging in to your online personal website to access all your data (what happened to public computer and safeguarding your users’ data?).
(3) When you see the “cloud” images that Sugarsync uses to indicate your data is stored in the cloud, don’t be deceived. From all the downtime and hardware failures, their infrastructure is hardly resilient or reliable. JFYI, Sugarsync brings down even their own website when upgrading their infrastructure, performing maintenance or releasing new client versions/features. After this episode, I can’t trust that Sugarsync will be accessible and functional when I’m out and about, travelling and working and thinking my files not synced on this computer are accessible online.
(4) When a product fails to do its core functionality, it’s time to move on. That happened when Sugarsync failed to reliable sync and process my data, about 25,000 files on one computer. When their service becomes unreliable (when hardware fails, or they are performing maintenance), their syncing also becomes unreliable. Over the last weekend (they had some hardware failure during non-working hours!), I lost some precious files when I made a change on one computer (moved the directory), of which was not fully registered by Sugarsync servers, which then caused a snowball effect on my other computers. I couldn’t retrieve the files from my deleted folder as I was also unsyncing (as they were duplicating quite a bit of my files thus snowballing the actual storage used) my 25k of files on my other computer (and had to empty deleted files to free up space).
Long story cut short. I’ve had enough of Sugarsync. I still have over ten months of my paid subscription. But I daren’t use it. If only it worked, they really have a compelling product. I’m baffled that despite all this, they have the audacity to introduce business plans. Their users can’t even use their service reliably, or provide decent support (to their paid customers!), and they want businesses to entrust them with their data?
This is one very clear example of how a good team and whose product has limited feature set (Dropbox) can do way better than their competitors.
After all this debacle, and numerous attempts to highlight issues to the Sugarsync team, I’m giving up. I will never entrust my data with them, using their service for my personal work data, let alone my company’s, until there is real change within the management team and their mindset towards users and our data.
My post was never to flame or put down Sugarsync’s product. I just hope they are reading and start to take their users and our data more seriously.
We are very sorry to hear about the challenges you’ve had with SugarSync. We absolutely understand how valuable access to your remote data is, and that a disruption in service is not simply an inconvenience. As you experienced and we noted in our recent blog post , a segment of our users did experience slowdowns and access issues recently with syncing and uploading/downloading files to their accounts due to a recent server upgrade and launch of our second data center. The upgrade is almost complete – the existing customer migration (that caused the performance problems) is done and the remaining tasks involves adding new capacity – which shouldn’t affect our customers.
While we did let our users know about the upgrade via the forums and blog, we are also taking steps to be much more proactive in our communications to our customers. Just last week, I hired a new senior communications person – she is determined to make sure users always have the latest SugarSync information. Even more critically, we’ve made a major change with our customer service department, hiring a new 8-person customer service team in-house at our San Mateo offices, to be available for our customers. While we’ll announce that formally imminently, I wanted to share the news now so you understand ticket response times should significantly improve immediately. I am 100% committed to it.
We want all of our users receive the highest level of service possible, both with the SugarSync solution and with our company. Again, I’m sorry your recent experience has not lived up to that standard, and we hope someday soon you will give us another chance.
Laura Yecies, CEO
I’m a user of SugarSync and have been using it for about 6 months and I truly believe the feature set, in my opinion, is far superior to Dropbox, Syncplicity, Live Mesh, Foldershare and other that I have tried.
The first 4 months were problem-free but the last two months, I don’t think a day has passed where I haven’t had problems with delays in files being synced. As I type this, I have had two files sitting in the queue for over 45 minutes waiting to be synced. My free Dropbox account syncs everything immediately while my paid SugarSync account is unpredictable.
With all the problems at the current time as can be seen on the forums, twitter, etc, I don’t think it is a wise decision to introduce a business edition where reliability is even more of a critical issue.
I love the service and want to keep using it but trying to work on a file at home (as happened yesterday) that I updated 2 hours ago at the office and it not being updated when I get home is causing me issues.
Dropbox, Dropbox, Dropbox – that´s the only really working, inexpensive way to share files in the cloud and it rocks! Believe me, I tested some services (like this one) and finally always came back to Dropbox.
I´m not working at Dropbox, but for the sake of that great service and for people who come through Google: http://www.dropbox.com
Register & try – you will love it!
I wonder if there is any different between SugarSync and Dropbox.
I’ve used SugarSynch for a year or more now and have put family and friends onto it. I’ve never had a problem, it quietly synch’s my works My Documents folder to my home pc, laptop and iphone reliably.
Not sure about speed because I don’t really care, as long as the files I’ve been working on during the day are on my home pc when I get home. I like the fact that I have set it up and have forgotten about it. The multiple version backup has saved me a few times too!
Good idea. A lot of businesses need cheaper and realiable products
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Nadya,
CloudBerry Lab team
There is a great online backup review and news and ceo interview website here:
http://friendfe...om/onlinebackup and
http://twitter....m/backup_review
Wow, a CEO comment. This post is good, but I had no idea it could reach all the way to the SugarCrunch CEO. Good work Leena!