Egnyte makes cloud storage a business
Posted by Kathleen Maher on December 11th 2011 | Discuss
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Software Review
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Dropbox, Sugar Sync, OpenDrive, Mozy, Egnyte ... there are quite a few options for cloud storage services, but Egnyte hopes to stand out with security and management as well as competitive pricing. The company is a startup founded in 2008. They’ve made a big introduction at CloudBeat 2011 where they showed off their latest product, which adds integration with Salesforce.com. Egnyte has a hybrid cloud product that offers flexibility over how customers want to store and share their data. There is a local storage option to allow constant access to important files even when not online—data syncs automatically. In the Online Cloud, users can share files with a generous number of people depending on the type of account they have. The plans support NAS drives if customers want to add their own storage to the system but it also adds another $40. per month to the price tag. It’s a bargain for larger workplaces, but with the NAS option, the price is creeping up for smaller offices.
The system offers several options for accessing posting files including a Java applet for uploading multiple files and support for FTP.
Notifications are the software’s strong point and weak point. Adminstrators and power users can share files and set permissions for files and they can tell when users access files and access can expire. Egnyte can get pretty talky. When files sync it lets you know with a dialog box that appears on your screen and it sends email notifications. You can be sure people have access to the right version by sending a link to the most recent version. All that’s great, but the Egnyte notification box is a little bit big, and ugly and orange. You won’t miss it. And emails? I’m not sure I want to know that much. You can turn notifications off, but it would be nice to have more granular controls of notification.
Egnyte has a nice professional look and feel to it and customers can customize their storage site with their own logo. Files can be previewed but the interface also allows thumbnails, which may be all you need to see photos and tell the difference between documents and Power Points, etc.
In our experiments with the technology, we found some rough edges. The local cloud storage didn’t sync as I’d expect. You have to tell Egnyte that files are to be synced and shared. That’s not unreasonable, but it’s been difficult for me to remember how to find my way to the Local Cloud control panel. By the way, if you’re in a similar situation, you can get there via the little control on the task bar—at the top of a Mac screen at the bottom of a Windows screen.
We found that the Mac version seems to be a little slicker and a little easier to understand than the PC version. We asked Egnyte about this, and they said other customers have said the same thing. They credit the Mac’s ability to move files faster and its more streamlined architecture.
The good news
Egnyte solves a key problem for for us and It’s the reason I thought I’d write a review of a storage product which admittedly, falls out of the realm of our focus and probably our expertise. Like a lot of small companies we’ve been sharing files via email, Dropbox and Google documents. Hardly ideal. In fact, we’ve created astounding nightmares of versionitis. We never know who has the correct document. Egnyte enables us to share resources via links to content centrally stored and to specify that only the most recent version be accessed. It’s not perfect—more could be done to take Egnyte to a more robust collaborative tool. Better notification and logs would be a start. Possibly file check in and file check out—but that might be beyond the charter Egnyte has set for itself. At the moment the company is concentrating on getting the basics right and offering their product at a competitive price. It works out to about $5 per person per month.
What do we think
The fact of the matter is, we’re all being dragged into into this cloud way of life. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s a bit of the wild west at the moment. The data management systems used by content creation professionals or designers and architects are coming to individuals and small business. Not a moment too soon, but instead of the very expensive and complete systems that are sold in the professional world, the mainstream is faced with putting systems together out of separate products for mail, contact management, document management. The little guy or guyette is the IT department and they’re the ones struggling to make it all work together. Egnyte is working with Google, it’s working with the Quick Office tool for phones and tablets on Android. It’s working with Sales Force to enabled sync’d collaboration. And of course there is an Outlook plug-in to bring those users into the fold. We also noticed that AutoCAD WS is supporting other cloud options Egnyte via the WebDav standard.
We’re talking overhead. We really are at an inflection point with all this cloud business. There will be better ways for this stuff to work together, and Egnyte looks like it’s trying to do just that and it’s offering its tools at an attractive price. We’re willing to give it a try simply because we’re getting to the point where our problems are screaming for solutions and solutions that are good enough for now, are a whole lot better than what we had before. – K.M.
