Amazon Web Services (AWS) has introduced its Dropbox-like service, Amazon Zocalo, a fully managed enterprise storage and sharing service. With Amazon Zocalo, users can store, share, and gather feedback on documents, spreadsheets, presentations, webpages, images, PDFs, or text files – from the device of their choice.
Amazon Zocalo is a cloud hosting based service that can integrate with existing corporate directories, and provides administrators with flexible sharing rules, audit logs, and control of the location where data is stored.
“Customers have told us that they’re fed up with the cost, complexity, and performance of their existing old guard enterprise document and collaboration management tools,” said Noah Eisner, General Manager, Amazon Zocalo at Amazon Web Services. “AWS was increasingly being asked to provide an enterprise storage and sharing tool that was easy to use, allowed users to quickly collaborate with others, and met the strict security needs of their organizations. That’s what Amazon Zocalo was built to do.”
Amazon Zocalo would offer the following benefits to users:
- Easy sharing: Amazon Zocalo lets users share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, webpages, images, PDFs, or text files with others.
- Access from any device: Users can access data stored in Amazon Zocalo and view and leave feedback anywhere, anytime, from the device of their choice, including laptops, iPad, Kindle Fire, and Android tablets. Amazon Zocalo can sync files across devices to ensure files are available anywhere, anytime.
- Simple feedback: Users can request and manage feedback from others, and contributors can highlight any word, sentence, paragraph, or area of a document or file and leave detailed feedback. Amazon Zocalo also notifies contributors and document owners about review activities and approaching deadlines via email.
- Central file hub: Amazon Zocalo provides users with a central location for both the documents and files they are reviewing as well as those they own and are soliciting feedback on. With all these files in one location, reviewers have access to all of the related feedback in a single web view.
- Available with Amazon WorkSpaces: Amazon WorkSpaces, AWS’s virtual desktop in the cloud service, is integrated with Amazon Zocalo. All Amazon WorkSpaces customers get Amazon Zocalo for free (with up to 50 GB of storage).
Amazon Zocalo would offer the following benefits to administrators:
- Security: All data stored in Amazon Zocalo is encrypted in transit and at rest, and administrators can set policies to control users’ sharing behavior, choose the AWS Region where users’ data is stored, and view audit logs to track file and user activity.
- Integration with corporate directory: Amazon Zocalo can integrate with an organization’s existing Active Directory, meaning that end-users can continue to use their existing enterprise credentials to access Amazon Zocalo.
