Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

WS-FTP Pro Makes File-Wrangling Easy: Page 2 of 4

If you're a business IT person, you'll most likely be most interested in WS-FTP's security and automation features. It does 256-bit AES transfer encryption over SSL / FTPS, SSH / SFTP and HTTPS connections, and also offers PGP file encryption, file integrity checking, HTTP proxy support for SSH, and logging of transfer activities, transfer history, and connections. WS-FTP Pro is advertised as meeting the encryption requirements for HIPAA transactions and file transfers. Obviously a lot of effort has gone into making WS-FTP Pro ready for the compliance marketplace.

And automation? You can program one-time or recurring file transfers, backups to local or remote storage (including USB or DVD drives, network directories, server connections, FTP sites or Internet hosting services). You can synchronize to any location and to virtually any device, drive, or server. It will send e-mail notifications when it completes scheduled tasks, and there's a scripting utility to make all these things easier to set up. Oh, and did I say it will automatically compress files before uploading?

Also For Individuals
If you're an individual user, perhaps in a small business or some kind of professional practice, the mention of automated backups and synchronizations should have gotten your attention. The fact that you can do them to any local or remote directory or device is actually more impressive than it sounds, because it also means that you can not only use WS-FTP Pro for FTP transfers, but as a local file-manager, too. (If you (like me) remember Norton Commander with fondness, then you'll understand what a compliment I'm paying when I say that WS-FTP is the Windows file manager that Commander should have been.)

Another new feature amplifies the value of its file-manager role: integration with desktop search. If you run Google Desktop, Copernic, or Windows Search, WS-FTP will use it to run a search and list the files containing hits in a new local pane.

Its use of thumbnails are also more useful than I would have thought. It's easy to spot two or three images you want to transfer if you can see thumbnails of all the files in a directory -- and thumbnails are configurable, so you can display them for local directories, but don't have to wait for them to build for remote directories.

Configurability Is The Keyword
In fact, configurability is one of the keywords of WS-FTP 2007. There's a configuration choice for just about every feature of the program, and things that I remember being hard-wired or annoying in earlier versions are now easy. I can delete non-empty folders. I can decide what double-clicking on a file does: Transfer it? View it? Or execute it?