Instant Folders Offers Instant Swapping

Sharing documents online is about to get easier, no matter what kind of documents you need to share. Instant Folders, an online file service recently launched by Punch Networks, allows the easy trade of everything from complex corporate documents to Little League schedules.

"This is a more automatic way for business users to distribute files," says John H. Williams Jr., the company's vice president of marketing. "People who share files won't be encumbered by the process of setting up group lists and searching for attachments when they arrive." The program made its debut at Internet World Fall 2000 Expo last week in New York.

To use Instant Folders, you must download a small utility from the Instant Folders Web site.

Instant Folders costs $49 per user per year, but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial period. If you decline to subscribe after the trial is over, you can still receive files, but you won't be able to send them.

More Up-to-Date Than E-Mail

So, why use Instant Folders instead of sending e-mail attachments?

One of the best reasons is its updating capability. You can change a file locally, and the revised data will appear on the recipient's desktop the next time she or he logs on. That means everyone in the workgroup always has the most current version.

Punch isn't unique in this approach. Recently, several online tools have offered this instant-update capability. (See "Mail Droplets Keep Falling on My Desktop" and "Survey: Thumbs Up on Zaplet Polls, Pictures.")

Instant Folders also encrypts files, making it safer than sending them over the Internet, Williams says. And incoming files are placed in folders instead of obscure, hard-to-find temporary directories.

Instant Folders also doubles as a backup and file access utility. Users are able to access their files on the Punch server if their own disks crash or if they want remote access of files without needing to use their own computers.