Over the past few years several of our clients have moved to cloud-based file storage. As part of our consulting and managed service engagement, we’ve been responsible for creating a strategy around document management, determining the best platform to use, and implementing a holistic migration that includes process improvement, training, and the decommissioning of the legacy file servers.
For many, SharePoint and OneDrive are the natural go-to platforms because they are included with Office 365 and are integrated with the Office suite of products. However, as we have done our analysis, we’ve discovered that the Microsoft platform lacked several key features our clients were looking for.
Generally, the key features our clients look for are similar:
- Easy Mobile Access
- Ease of Administration
- Version and Access Controls
Here is a brief summary of what we found as we did our research and product comparison:
SharePoint
- No dedicated mobile apps
- Difficult for business units to administer
- Requires third parties to create a Microsoft account to access files shared with them
- Poor mobile client
- File size limitations
- Really meant as a “personal” or home drive storage replacement
- Poor access controls
- No file locking or concurrent editing
- No concurrent editing
- Limited previous versions of files
We looked at several other solutions and landed on ShareFile for several reasons:
- ShareFile’s mobile clients are outstanding with excellent search and share capabilities
- ShareFile is easy for business units to administrate while providing the access controls needed for an enterprise solution
- ShareFile’s various clients meet the special needs of all of our user groups
- ShareFile’s Outlook plug in allows you to send links to files stored on ShareFile directly from your email client as well as providing an optional encryption policy
This summer, Gartner confirmed our findings, ranking ShareFile in the upper right quadrant for cloud-based file storage.
With the recent addition of Online Collaboration with Office 365, ShareFile has become the perfect companion product to the Microsoft cloud suite of products. We’ve made ShareFile a pivotal part of our TeamWorkAnyWhere solution for cloud-based communication and collaboration.
As we have traveled around the country migrating files and training our clients on the rich feature set of ShareFile, our end-users have been ecstatic. We’ve even enhanced our implementations of ShareFile with our unique backup process for shared folders.
If you would like to learn more about why our clients choose ShareFile, view our recorded webinars here.