Following up on last week’s release of the Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition, we’re pleased to announce the addition of support for Amazon S3 European buckets for Workgroup Edition users. European buckets allow your data to be stored in Amazon data centers throughout Europe, providing faster performance and regulatory compliance for European customers. Amazon prices their European storage slightly higher, at $0.18 per gigabyte. European customers have a choice of storing their data in Europe or the US.

No software upgrade is required. Workgroup Administrators can now create European buckets in the My Account web administration interface, and assign access to their existing users. Not signed up for the Workgroup Edition? It’s just $2 per month per user, and allows multiple users to securely share a single Amazon S3 account. Learn more and sign up on the Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition site.

Please note that the Jungle Disk Plus features, including upload resume and block-level updates, are not currently compatible with European buckets. The Amazon EC2 service we use to provide these features is not yet available in Europe. Once it is, we plan to offer the Jungle Disk Plus functionality in Europe as well.

After over a month of beta testing by thousands of users, we’re pleased to announce the official release of the Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition. The Workgroup Edition allows multiple users to securely share a single S3 account with private and shared network drives and built-in automatic backup. The workgroup administrator can receive daily reports on usage as well as backup status for all their users.

Pricing for the Workgroup Edition is simple - just $2 per user per month, plus the standard Amazon S3 storage at $0.15 per gigabyte. The price includes all the Jungle Disk Plus features and there is no up-front purchase required. The Workgroup Edition license allows each user to install the software on multiple machines at no additional charge, a significant savings compared to other workgroup backup services.

Read more about the Workgroup Edition and sign up on the main Jungle Disk site. You can also read the official press release for the Workgroup Edition launch on Yahoo business.

Note for current beta customers: The non-beta release of the software is version 2.10a, which was released last week. If you haven’t already upgraded, you can download the latest version on the Workgroup Edition download page.

We’re pleased to announce new versions of both the Desktop and Workgroup editions of Jungle Disk are now available. Jungle Disk 2.10a adds Remote Backup Reporting, a highly requested feature. Remote Backup Reporting allows you to receive backup reports via web, E-mail, and RSS, allowing you to easily stay on top of your backups and ensure you’re notified if errors occur.

Backup summary reports are available for all Jungle Disk users. Jungle Disk Plus and Workgroup Edition users also have the option of reporting full backup logs, in addition to the backup summary information. After enabling Backup Reporting under Backup Options, you can view your backup reports online, and configure E-mail and RSS notifications.

The 2.10 release includes a few other new features as well as several bug fixes. Please see the release notes for full details. As always, upgrades are free for all users.

Updated versions of the Desktop and Workgroup Edition of Jungle Disk are now available for download. Version 2.02a is primarily a maintenance release, fixing a number of issues outlined in the Release Notes. We did, however, manage to sneak in one highly requested new feature for Mac users. You can now choose to have Jungle Disk appear in the Menu bar instead of the dock, for those that prefer a less cluttered dock view.

One issue that was fixed that deserves some additional explaination is a problem with Unicode (non-ascii) file / directory names in Jungle Disk 2.0 buckets. In some cases we’ve had users report seeing “duplicate” files or folders, one with the correct name, and one with the Unicode characters replaced by question marks (?). We tracked down the problem, and it turned out to be caused by a problem with a few servers on Amazon S3 itself, not with the Jungle Disk software. You can see the technical description of the problem and Amazon’s response here. Amazon has corrected the problem on their end, so it won’t affect any uploads going forward. For data that has already been uploaded, we’ve updated our Consistency Check feature (on the Help menu) to detect and correct the duplicate filenames. After upgrading to 2.02a we recommend all users with Jungle Disk 2.0 buckets run the Consistency Check to ensure that any stray duplicates are cleaned up.

Along with the the Jungle Disk Desktop 2.0 release we’re also pleased to announce the availability of a public beta for the Workgroup Edition. First announced back in April, the Workgroup Edition allows multiple users to securely share a single Amazon S3 account without sharing the account credentials with each user. Instead, sub-accounts are created for each user, and an administrator can control which buckets a user has access to, including support for read-only buckets. The software supports an unlimited number of sub-accounts and buckets.

The Workgroup Edition makes it easy for small companies to backup their desktops and have a secure network drive to share between employees. The software is built on the robust and well-tested codebase of the Desktop Edition. The pricing for the Workgroup Edition software is simple - just $2 per user per month, which includes all the Jungle Disk Plus functionality as well. Each user can install the software on multiple machines at no additional charge and free upgrades are included. All you pay for storage and transfer is the base Amazon S3 rates($0.15 per gigabyte) making Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition one of the most affordable workgroup storage solutions available.

You can read more about the Workgroup Edition on our newly redesigned website.  Companies interested in trying out the beta version can sign-up now and get started right away.

The launch of Jungle Disk 2.0 is drawing near. Today we’re making available Release Candidate builds for final testing. If no major issues come up these versions will become the final release. All Jungle Disk 2.0 beta users should update to this version (2.00a) and we’d encourage users still running 1.50 to consider giving this version a try - there are no outstanding issues that we are aware of.

You can download the release candidate from our beta download page. As always, you can read about the latest features and fixes in the release notes. Please post any issues you encounter to our beta forum.

For our Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition private beta testers, we are also making an updated build of the Workgroup Edition beta available. You can download it from our Workgroup Beta download page. For those not in the private beta program, the public beta for the Workgroup Edition will be launching shortly.

We’re going to be conducting a private beta test of the Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition in the next few weeks. If you’d like to participate, you can sign-up on our interest list. Resellers who have already signed up on the interest list for the reseller edition will be invited to join the beta as well, you do not need to sign up again.

In my last post, I outlined many of the great new things that you will see in Jungle Disk 2.0.  The product is making a huge leap forward in many areas and the Jungle Disk team is working very hard to get things wrapped up to begin the beta process.  Now that I have seen 2.0 in action, I am probably more excited than all of you to get my hands on it!

Over the past several months, many of our customers communicated a clear need to leverage the powerful online backup and storage functionality of Jungle Disk across groups of users. As the needs of our customers grow, so does our desire to meet those needs through improvements and additions to the Jungle Disk product line.

Thus, it is with great pleasure that we officially announce the future release of the Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition.  This new addition to the product line shares all of the power and usability of Jungle Disk 2.0, while providing several additional features to make the administration of groups of users possible.  Here are just a few of the enhancements that you will see in the Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition:

• The ability to create ’sub-accounts’ to support multiple users with a single S3 account
• Customizable secure access control to multiple buckets, along with private and shared buckets
• User management, bucket management and usage reporting via a web-based admin console

Our plan is to offer the workgroup edition for $2 per user per month.  This fee would include the software, support, upgrades, and Jungle Disk Plus. I would like to emphasize that this is a per user license and not a per computer license.  Each licensed user can install the software on multiple computers (work, home, laptop, etc.) at no additional cost.  Pricing for the Amazon S3 service remains just $0.15 per GB.

To ensure that there is a clear distinction between products as we go forward, the existing Jungle Disk application will be referred to as the Jungle Disk Desktop Edition.

Without question, the Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition is a great step towards giving our business customers more control over their online backup and storage.  More information about signing up for the private beta and the planned release dates will be shared in the near future.