The following posting is written by our guest blogger, Thomas Kaufmann, a PhD student at the Laboratory for Electromagnetic Fields and Microwave Electronics at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Some days ago I submitted my dissertation at ETH Zurich. Simulations were performed in MATLAB, the document was generated with LaTex, and the graphics were built with Inkscape. For me it was important not to be bound to one place during this creative writing process. I had my desktop computer in the office, a powerful laptop to run simulations and a small ultra-mobile netbook with a very long battery life. Using the sync option in Wuala, I always had a current copy on my local disk space. When swapping from one computer to the other, I just had to wake up the machine, wait a few seconds and continue working seamlessly. The fact that I did not have to worry about updating my data every time I swapped computers, and have a backup in case of theft allowed me to concentrate on the actual writing.
The use of Wuala allowed me to work in the office, on trains, at home, and even in a holiday apartment in Zermatt, where I stayed with friends for a week. In combination with a mobile internet stick, I had my whole data at hand locally and could continue literature research and connect to more powerful computers at ETH.
One of my co-examiners is located in Australia. He and the other examiners had to have access to the document during the review process of the thesis. With Wuala, I could simply put a new version on our shared group folder. He would put comments and corrections in the PDF file with Adobe Acrobat Pro, and thanks to the time difference I had all his contributions at hand the next morning. The comment function in the shared group allowed me to point out details and particular things to look at, which is readable for all group members.
Within half a year after starting using Wuala, I moved my data management went from pure disaster with different versions of documents and code cluttered on several computers to a well-functioning, highly flexible and reliable solution. The simplicity and flexibility of Wuala outrank the functionality of other tools such as SVN or rsync for my application. After my experiences several people in my research group started using Wuala as well.
One of my co-examiners is located in Australia. He and the other examiners had to have access to the document during the review process of the thesis. With Wuala, I could simply put a new version on our shared group folder. He would put comments and corrections in the PDF file with Adobe Acrobat Pro, and thanks to the time difference I had all his contributions at hand the next morning. The comment function in the shared group allowed me to point out details and particular things to look at, which is readable for all group members.
Within half a year after starting using Wuala, I moved my data management went from pure disaster with different versions of documents and code cluttered on several computers to a well-functioning, highly flexible and reliable solution. The simplicity and flexibility of Wuala outrank the functionality of other tools such as SVN or rsync for my application. After my experiences several people in my research group started using Wuala as well.
(Image by mortsan, License: CC BY 2.0)
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