Microsoft Skydrive Online Storage: Free and Useful

Have you ever wanted to just put some files "online somewhere," either to have later or to share with someone? Google's got its offering, and if your company has a server there are always tools like FTP, but Microsoft's new Skydrive online file storage service might fill the need better than either of those.

The Pros:

• Clientless - just uses an internet browser - and works across OSes (not limited to Windows).
• 5GB of data, which is more than Google offers, and probably more than enough for most
• Sub-folder capability, to help separate and organize your files
• Shareability allows you to invite other people to retrieve the files, or even upload their own files. This is on a folder-by-folder level, and you can launch invitations to people for access to specific folders.
• Public Folder capability, to allow anonymous users to access files you designate as Public.

The Cons:

• You can only upload or download 5 files at a time, and no files bigger than 50MB. (I assume these rules are to attempt to thwart P2P music and movie sharing.)
• Transfer rates are fairly slow.
• You and your users must have a Windows Live login (except for folders made Public). No big deal for me, as it's free and pretty easy to sign up, and I've not seen a deluge of MS-related spam as a result.
• This is not a "corporate" solution, in that there is no guarantee that your data will be there tomorrow, there is no way to ensure/verify privacy and intrusion protection is not very strong.

In short, Skydrive is good for non-critical data that needs to be available quickly and easily, and perhaps even shared with mutliple users. It's definitely not a corporate solution, and is far from being compliant with standards like HIPAA . . . but it fills the "casual sharing" need very well.