AvePoint Adds File Sync & Share for Microsoft SharePoint

Jersey City, N.J.-based AvePoint today released AvePoint Perimeter Service Pack (SP) 7, which includes full enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) for 
SharePoint 2016 users — even to those beyond the firewall.

With the new release users will be able to sync files and data to mobile devices. That’s important because SharePoint 2016 includes a mobile app for iOS and Android devices.

Workers can now take SharePoint in their pockets while ensuring content security through tight administrative controls.

Paul Olenick, director of Product Strategy at AvePoint, said the company responded to user demand and higher SharePoint adoption.

“SharePoint 2016 has been in the market long enough that more of our customers are starting to test and adopt it. For that reason, it was the right time to fully support SharePoint 2016,” he said.

The release includes other features to make workers more mobile. Among them are:

• Support for mobile editing of Microsoft Office documents
• Password management for external users giving administrators the power to dictate password requirements for external access
• Administrator management of sharing options and restrictions for SharePoint groups
• Administrator management of document and content metadata to enable or restrict content access

Perimeter SP 7 follows the July release of Perimeter SP 6, which integrated Walldorf, Germany-based SAP’s social software platform, Jam, with SharePoint for collaboration across repositories.

The new release is about SharePoint 2016 support for metadata-based filtering for secure share and more administrative controls, Olenick said.

“Metadata filtering, in particular, sets up a lot of interesting scenarios. For example, if the customer has workflows or systems that set metadata for various purposes, we can allow or disallow external sharing based on the tag.”

Perimeter SP 7 is launching into a crowded market. But Olenick said Perimeter is different because it is deeply integrated with SharePoint. Other solutions usually rely on a connector, which he said “compromises the use case.”

For example, one competitor has a SharePoint connector that essentially pulls down copies of SharePoint files into a dedicated folder on the user’s local system. “Then that file is shared out. At best, this is confusing and at worst, it compromises the single-source-of-truth version in SharePoint,” he said.