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Last month, AP contacted Smith Micro with the intention of writing a detailed hands-on with SendStuffNow (SSN). Specifically, we wanted to look at SSN from a corporate-use perspective with the (then) new Android app. They made themselves available in a beautiful fashion, with Matthew Covington, Senior Director of Product Management, taking the time to thoroughly demonstrate the software to us. Unfortunately, complications arose on our end of things, with the end result that SSN has landed in my un-corporate lap. Thus, I'll be providing an overview and a very brief hands-on, but not in the depth we'd planned and not from a corporate-use perspective.

Overview

SendStuffNow is a secure cloud-storage service. Or, wait, scratch that - Smith Micro calls it a "Secure File Delivery Service." Is there a difference? Well, actually, yeah.

SendStuffNow stores your data in the cloud, much like Dropbox. Unlike Dropbox though, there's a strong corporate slant with SSN; during the demo, Matthew explained that while they want personal users to use and enjoy it, the feature set complements creative professionals very well. Do they accomplish that? Hard for me to say - I'm neither creative nor an enterprise user. Still, from my brief time using SSN, it seems to be a pretty solid service.

For a personal user, the biggest draw is likely to be the massive file size limit: up to 1 GB for personal users (8 GB for pro users). Doesn't sound like a ton in the era of 3,000 GB hard drives, but compared to the 25 MB attachment limit on GMail, it's actually pretty substantial.

Setup/Usage - PC

Setup is extremely easy, especially if you use the website to do so. All you do is navigate to the SendStuffNow homepage and you're greeted with 6 fields you need to fill in.

Once you complete and submit the form, your file is uploaded and shared. The page redirects to your file admin page, and at the same time two emails are sent out. The first goes to you and lets you know your account has been setup and that your file was sent; the second goes to the recipient and tells them that you've sent a file, and provides a download link. Again, the simplicity here is fantastic.

The admin panel allows you to control invites - whether it be to retract, resend, or send to new people. Further, it allows you to keep track of your uploads and your account/traffic usage, among other things. It also provides a slew of enterprise-level options, such as importing users from an external list, and group management. Again - unfortunately, that's beyond the scope of my usage, but know that those tools are there and are well developed.

Usage - Android

The app is characteristically simple, small, and easy to use. Upon first run, you're presented with the option to either create an account or use an existing one. If you've made it this far, you know that I have an existing account. Thus, I simply logged in.

The Android interface is a stripped-down version of the web interface. In other words, once you're accustomed to the interface on one medium, you should be fine using the service on any other. Adding a file is as easy as tapping the appropriate button, choosing a source, and then picking the file.

The last step is to upload and share the file. Again, the slant here is customization and corporate use, so the app allows you to set how long an invite is valid for. And I repeat once more: simple.

You can control numerous aspects of each file by long-pressing and changing whichever options you see fit. As with the web interface, the App interface provides a bar to show how much storage and traffic has been used (shown in 5 of the 6 above screenshots).

Wrap-up

Smith Micro has released the SendStuffNow app on the iPhone/iPad and Android, and has a Blackberry app in the folds. They also provide a clean, direct, useful web-interface, and recently released a plugin to integrate it into Outlook. The end result is that SSN can be easily integrated into a variety of setups.

Again, it's unfortunate that we couldn't give SendStuffNow a more thorough review, especially in an enterprise setting. Still, from my short time with it, it seems like a pretty slick service that truly is well suited for creative professionals.