Last week we announced the availability of Flik, the first-ever commercial software to be wholly designed and built by Subvert. Although file sharing has come a long way with Microsoft Windows 7, we thought we could still significantly improve the experience; the result is this product.

Microsoft has a simple built-in file sharing feature called Homegroups. If you're on a home network, it's pretty straightforward to set up Homegroups. Just enable the feature, join the group that shows up and pick the folders or libraries you want to share. The problem with Homegroups is two-fold: first, you need to be on a home-based network, which in our case, being in an office, doesn't apply. The second is that you can only share with other people who are using Windows 7, so if you're on a network with computers running Windows Vista, XP or Server, even Mac OS X, you're out of luck.

Windows 7 also gives you the ability to share files and folders with anybody on your network, independent of their Windows operating system version. The issue with this built-in feature is that it's too difficult to set up for non-geeks. First you need to pick the folder you want to share, then choose the user or groups who will be able to see it and finally, apply a series of cryptic permissions. If that sounds easy, turns out you're a geek (don't worry, we are too).

So, how is Flik different and what it makes it better than built-in Windows file sharing?

Reason #1: Ridiculously easy setup

With Flik, we wanted to make it dead simple to share files and folders with other people on a Windows network. After months of design, development and testing, we finally got the process down to a single step: install Flik on your computer. That's it. The software then continuously shouts out to others on the same network who are running Flik and allows you to connect with them in a matter of seconds. Close the application window and Flik stops shouting. Open it again and you're available in an instant.

Reason #2: Notifications

Using the built-in Windows file sharing, if somebody drops a file into your shared folder there's no way for you to know that it's there. The person could send you a follow-up email, text message or voicemail - maybe even smack you upside the head - but until they do or you check yourself, there's no alert. With Flik, the software displays a subtle notification in the Windows Taskbar whenever new stuff shows up.

Reason #3: Chat messaging

Windows file sharing is anti-social by nature. All you're doing is sending files and folders back & forth, which is fine, but if you want to send a message or toss in some additional details regarding what you've sent, that needs to be passed along in another file. There's also no way to historically go back and see what was said about a particular file or folder. With Flik, chat messaging is baked right in. As such, you can use Flik as a dedicated network chat application without having to install more software.

Reason #4: Send anything

The types of files that work best with built-in Windows file sharing are documents and folders. If you want to share a snippet of text or a website address (URL) with another user, it gets confusing and is hard to do. This is actually why we built Flik in the first place; an easy way for us to send interesting and/or important information back and forth between members of our team.

Reason #5: Big files are no problem

Transferring very large documents or folders across an internal network is easy with Windows file sharing, but crazy slow. In our testing, we were able to send a 200 MB file from one Flik user to another in less than 20 seconds. With the built-in Windows file sharing, that process took well over a minute. Imagine what would happen with a 900 MB file or a 2 GB archive. This is particularly useful for people who need to share big files with others on the same network but want to avoid paying huge Internet bandwidth costs by having to upload/download files to an external, web-based service like Dropbox.

So, to wrap up...

As you can tell, we're really proud of Flik. We want to tell the world how useful of a product it is so that people will buy a license and make us wildly rich (okay, maybe that's a bit of a stretch). But, others are already starting to talk about and share Flik with others, which is pretty darn amazing. It's fun building cool stuff.

We hope you will find a place for Flik on your own computer(s). Let us know what you think if you do.