Recently we had the chance to help one of our customer achieve a data synchronization task, which spawned an unusual cooperation that gave birth to a tale worth telling. So, here we go.

Our customer was using Syncplify.me AFT!, our scriptable secure file transfer client, to automate some unattended data synchronization tasks.

One of these tasks was failing with an unusual error message. At first we didn’t think much of it, because it seemed to be just a refusal from the server to set the file last modification date after the upload, which is a very common scenario, and AFT! handles it gracefully.

Upon further investigation, though, turns our that the error message had deeper roots.
That’s when the conversation was broadened, to include the vendor of the server software as well: the server in question was SFTP To Go, by Crazy Ant Labs.

Crazy Ant Labs’ support staff was courteous, and very quick at pointing out that since SFTP To Go’s back-end storage is based on AWS S3, it also inherits some of S3’s well-known “quirks”. In this particular case it was an unsupported set of file-open flags.

Thanks to this rational assessment, our team was able to quickly release a new minor version of AFT! that specifically addresses this limitation, while also retaining the previous broader set of file-open flags for those cases that support them, automatically determining which file-open flag set should be used on a case by case manner.

We all here at Syncplify were impressed with the courtesy and professionalism of the Crazy And Labs’ staff, who have been most helpful both in identifying the problem in the first place, and in providing precise feedback to help us resolve it.

Good cooperation between software vendors in the same space led to a customer success story for all the parties involved.