Food4Rhino

 Why bother with document control and management?  When you have a team of designers sharing and editing the same files, and especially when all the team members are not all in the same office, then you really need to ensure two things: first, team members don’t overwrite each other’s data; and second, team members are working with the most current information.  In the old days, when we all shared an office and a drive on the LAN, this was taken care of for us with Windows.  Today, many of us work from home with consumer-grade bandwidth.  If we're part of a team editing files with geometry, then we need to get control of our files.

Kenesto has developed, and field-hardened, its cloud-based document management solution that emulates the security and control of using a local shared drive.  Users share access to folders and files on the Kenesto K drive which presents just like the C drive in Windows Explorer.  Automatic file locking is achieved within half a second, worldwide.  The Kenesto K drive serves up a locally-cached version of the design files but the there is only a single source of truth – the reference file lives on a secure Amazon S3 server, fully encrypted and safe from prying eyes.  Note that this is very different from Box, Dropbox, Egnyte, Google Drive and OneDrive, all of which attempt to synchronize locally stored versions of files with the version stored on the cloud.  These solutions work perfectly fine for files that are not changing, or if you're the only person who needs access, but synchronizing breaks down when the files are changing frequently.  Our customers range from small architectural firms with a few seats of Rhino to medium-sized consumer products companies with engineering teams around the globe.

Kenesto also delivers collateral security benefits.  Storing every version of every file securely in the cloud enables system-wide rollback in the event of a local security breach.  Access to files and folders can be restricted from view-only through full read/write/create and these permissions can be set with an expiration date. 

Sharing permissions are set at the folder level and range from view only through full read/write/create/delete/share.