Managed File Transfer is fast becoming the latest buzz phrase for all those businesses needing a file transfer solution.  Managed File Transfer is not a new concept its been around for a number of years its just that companies now need file transfer to be an integrated process within the organisation instead of a standalone process with little to no management information.

The term Managed File Transfer basically suggests that the process of transferring files is audited, providing reporting, guaranteed delivery and automation.  Hermstedt’s StingRay Managed File Transfer Server has been around for seven years now and provides a great degree of management information including which user sent the files, when and what files they sent and to who.

In addition to tracking and logging all of the managed file transfers that the StingRay undertakes it also stores all of the accounting logs on the server for exporting in a tab delimited format so that they may be used for accounting purposes.

Managed File Transfer doesn’t need to be expensive.  There are many products on the market which position themselves in this space many of them many times more expensive than the StingRay Managed File Transfer server.

Why should companies invest in Managed File Transfer?  Quite simply other file transfer solutions don’t offer the range of features required for today’s file transfer requirements.  Send and forget just isn’t an option these days businesses need to be able to rely on guaranteed delivery of data.  Managed File Transfer is the future of file transfer.

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Momentum is gathering with regard to development of the StingRay file transfer server.  With Hermstedt not releasing any updates for a couple of years we thought we’d follow the 2.5.0 release in December with a 2.5.1 release in February.  Whilst there are only a few minor changes they are not insignificant.

With the release of new features comes new challenges and as the Email Hyperlink feature was only text based there was always the potential for problems with the rather long hyperlinks to the files stored on the StingRay.  With some PC email clients we found that the links were being broken so we bought out the HTML links as quickly as possible which certainly helped with the formatting of the emails too!

All StingRay users on version 2.5.0-x should now upgrade to the latest firmware version to take advantage of this enhancement.

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Implementing a new file transfer solution can significantly improve the way in which your company works especially if you’re in the graphic arts or prepress industry.  Providing a range of file transfer protocols to enable you to work with your customer in the way that they want to transfer files, is only part of the battle.  If you don’t have the infrastructure in place, that is the Internet connectivity (bandwidth) then you won’t be able to take advantage of your new solution.

During my regular trawl of the Internet I found a great article which helps users to understand a little more about how long it takes to send files over the Internet.  The article, written by Greg Ferro goes on to explain about how latency and data encyption can add to the overall time taken to transfer your files.

If you need to analyse the throughput required on your Internet connection to transfer large files at a reasonable speed then have a read of this article - How Long Does It Take to Transfer Data?

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