This article originally appeared in TidBITS on 2003-11-24 at 12:00 p.m.
The permanent URL for this article is: http://db.tidbits.com/article/7449
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Creo Eases File Sharing with Tokens

by Adam C. Engst

Creo Eases File Sharing with Tokens -- Have you found sharing files via email frustrating? Email, as we've been predicting, is becoming increasingly unreliable, thanks to spam-overloaded servers and inaccurate filters, and, when we're talking about file sharing, encoding format troubles and attachment size limitations. Creo, makers of the Six Degrees program for managing email-based workgroups, has come up with an alternative called Tokens, which works with both the Mac and Windows. Rather than attach your huge Keynote presentation to an email message to multiple people, you use the $50 Tokens Creator to create a several-kilobyte "token" that points back to a compressed and encrypted version of the Keynote file on your hard disk. When your recipients receive the token you sent, they double-click it to open it in the free Token Redeemer, which retrieves the presentation from your computer. Your computer must be left on and connected to the Internet to serve the file; if there are other network obstructions (such as firewalls) between the recipient and your computer, Token Redeemer automatically retrieves the file via Creo's Tokens relay service (which allows up to 5 GB per month of transfer). After a basic installation on both sides, no setup is necessary, and no one has to worry about user accounts or passwords. Creo also offers a $600 Tokens Server, which comes with 10 licenses for Token Creator and handles the file serving duties for all of them. Tokens is definitely a 1.0 product, but it's interesting, and could serve an important role in simplifying file transfer. [ACE]

<http://www.creo.com/tokens/>