Jungle Disk Goes Workgroup

Jungle Disk, the Amazon S3-backed online storage software is out with a new version. This time it’s the release of the Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition, which sets its sights on small and medium groups who need to manage shared storage resources. Like Jungle Disk’s other products, the basic idea here is to install a pipeline to Amazon S3 storage that hides all the details of the local/remote divide. To users, a Jungle Disk drive looks just like another network hard drive, whether they’re using Windows, OS X, or Linux. But when you copy files to that drive, they get encrypted and sent off to Amazon. Jungle Disk doesn’t charge you directly for storage; you just get billed your 15 cents per gigabyte per month directly from Amazon.

The Workgroup edition adds some additional features specifically aimed at groups of multiple people who need to share one storage account (single users with multiple computers are already covered by the basic Desktop edition). Most notably, this includes the ability to create subaccounts and apply access controls, while still having everything show up on one unified bill from Amazon. For example, you could create an “Accounting” bucket that could only be seen by management and accounting users, and a “Documents” bucket that most people have Read access to while authors have Read/Write access.

In addition to the shared storage, Jungle Disk Workgroup still supports timed backup jobs for individual users, using the same engine as in the other Jungle Disk products. It also gives administrators unified reporting, so they can track both storage usage and the success (or failure) of individual backups.

The pricing for Workgroup edition is $2 per user per month. That includes the features that are found in the $1 per month Jungle Disk Plus account, with web-based file access and upload resume. If you find yourself in need of a painless way to transfer files between team members spread around the world, and would like to get desktop backup as well, it seems like a bargain price.