Access Employee or Student Home Folders through Web and Mobile Devices Large enterprises and universities provide their employees with personalized home folders. Typically, these can be accessed from the campus or office premises. However, this causes problems for remote workers or people who would like to access these files on their mobiles and tablets. FileCloud […]
Large enterprises and universities provide their employees with personalized home folders. Typically, these can be accessed from the campus or office premises. However, this causes problems for remote workers or people who would like to access these files on their mobiles and tablets. FileCloud helps in accessing these home folders from the web through your browser, your smartphones or tablets.
The general working idea is that there is usually a top level directory or folder, within which there are sub-level directories for individual users. For the end user, only their own private directory is visible to them for their use, whereas the admin has access to all the directories. Such a system is explained by the diagram below.
FileCould provides the facility of Smart Mounts, where network paths are assigned to groups, which translate into individual home folders for end users in the group. As the diagram suggest, home folders for each user is created under a top level directory, where users can view their respective home folders.
To create Smart Mounts in FileCloud, login to your admin account and click on the Manage Shares under Network Shares in the left panel. Then, click on Add New on the top right corner.
In the new dialog box that appears, enter a network share name, and check “Smart Mount”. The Smart Mount Parameter is the identifier which creates directories. You can use %DISPLAYNAME%, %USERID% or %EMAILID% as parameters. Once, you have successfully created a Smart Mount, it looks like the screenshot below.
You can then click on the Users button to add users to the Smart Mount.
The end users can access their smart folders through the web interface, desktops, smartphones or tablets. To check how it looks in a web interface, log in to the end user portal and go to Files > Network Shares to see the existing Smart Folders available to the user.
To access it through SmartPhones, you need to install FileCloud on your device. You can visit the additional downloads page to get it for your device. For testing purposes, we use a Samsung Galaxy S4, an Android device.
After installation of the app from Google Play, we need to login to the server. After providing the credentials, we can access our Smart Folders from within our phone.
Click on your corresponding user to check the files under the user. In our case, it’s the user sdaityari.
Similarly, you can access these SmartMounts from other devices too.
If you are concerned about the security of your files, FileCloud allows management and remote wiping of these home folders through the admin interface.
We hope that this post helped you understand how to setup SmartMounts on FileCloud. In case you have any issues, you can leave us a comment below.
