On a tangential note, I had no idea what AeroFS is, so I clicked on their landing page.
> Like Dropbox, but behind your firewall. File Sync and Share for the enterprise. Free up to 30 users.
Boom. I immediately am fully educated about what this does. I wasn't forced to watch a 2 minute video with no sound at work, or to google the product - questioning about why it's popular[0].
This is how you write effective copy.
[0] Notable offenders are yeoman and dropbox itself - both of which, while widely-used products - are completely opaque in what they do from their initial text. "You already know what I do" isn't good enough for people who don't.
I mostly agree with you, but their first sentence ("Like Dropbox...") relies on you knowing what Dropbox is. Which, as you pointed out, isn't good enough for people who don't ;).
I think it can be broken up into three parts. First:
Like Dropbox, but behind your firewall.
For many people, that's a sufficient description to get the idea. If not, you have the second part:
File Sync and Share for the enterprise.
Not as descriptive as the first part if you know what Dropbox is, but if you don't it will at least let you know how to categorize the product and whether it's something you might remotely be interested in. Finally:
Free up to 30 users.
Now they've made sure the next most salient point is given, the next thing you would most likely want to know. Everything else is something you can dig a little deeper for, but for the most part you know whether this is something you want to pursue or not. I think it's brilliant.
If you don't know what it is after "Like Dropbox, but behind your firewall. File Sync and Share for the enterprise", you aren't their target market anyway.
Good copy takes into account who it addresses. Obviously someone who nows how to estimate what "firewall" means in an IT context will have a rough idea as to what a Dropbox is.
Exactly my reaction. I love this tagline because it just echoes how you would describe the product to a friend: "Oh it's like X but with Y".
It's at the complete opposite of the general trend of obscure generic headlines, like "Make your life better" or "Be more productive" or "Gain time and money", or the worst "Sign up for free" (yes, I've seen that as the main headline).
It just makes sense to not waste your visitors' time because they won't stay long enough to decipher your marketing gibberish.
Or narratively describes the product to customers already accustomed to the value add of product x, but need ancillary features and benefits not present in x. I'm of the opinion that comparing one product to another only devalues the one if the other is objectively a bad product.
If I'm evaluating several products, the one who makes it harder to get information is the first on the scrapheap, unless it clearly has a killer feature.
Might be just me not being an IT guy, but from that copy I'm not sure how it differs from a traditional file server with cifs/whatever shares like most businesses already have.
I think it's the opposite: to me you sound like an IT guy since you know about cifs and file servers and you have hard time understanding the value because you are looking from a technical instead of user perspective.
AeroFS syncs files to the local hard drive, meaning you can access them when not connected to the office network. It also automatically syncs any changes once you reconnect.
"Put your stuff in Dropbox and get to it from your computers, phones, or tablets. Edit docs, automatically add photos, and show off videos from anywhere."
What about this is unclear? It's on the front page..
Huh, and I reloaded and got different text:
"Dropbox is a safe, simple way to access your files on any device." - this time right above the download button.
> What about this is unclear? It's on the front page..
It is, but companies are not entitled to me reading their entire landing page. There's a large amount of truth in the "you only have 5 seconds to hook a user".
You should always put your best copy as the first thing a user sees.
I don't know the current state of affairs, but a couple of years ago Dropbox wasn't so good for businesses, as they were lacking a lot of compliance tickboxes.
The price suddenly jumps from $0 to $525/mo (35 x $15/mo) when going from 30 users to 35 users. When you just need 5 more users than the free, you don't just pay $15/mo for the 5 extra users, but have to pay for $15/mo for the previously free 30 users as well.
This is most likely going to discourage startups and other small-but-growing companies from using AeroFS.
I can understand the perspective, but if you have 35 (or even 31) people at your company, $500 a month is not a significant expenditure compared to salaries.
To bad 99% of managers never think that way. Usually it is salaries are a fixed amount in our budget this extra money needs to go through the process of being approved = Make people work longer to save the hassle. No one accounts for the most expensive cost which is salaries.
If you have a product (any product) in daily use by 30 staff, then switching costs (productivity hit) likely become the dominant factor in making a decision. I would be shocked that $500/mth comes into the picture when the salary expense has gotta be north of $100,000 a month for 30 staff.
Salary and benefits are an HR cost. As Project manager I don't care about that.
IT costs are booked to the project or if you are lucky to central licensing bucket which can aggregate users and obtain a discount. Either way that comes out of my project bucket which is already besieged by too many expenses.
I think you just gave a perfect description of how bureaucratic details produce microoptimizations that, while beneficial to the individual decision-maker, are not optimal for the organization.
I'll refer you back to the "Shadow IT" that was mentioned in the article, while the company I work out has the money to spend on something like this it would never go anywhere since we are a "startup" (Stretching the definition a little) and any cost over $0 is heavily scrutinized (for better or worse). We still use jabber because "It's Free" and now that we have 70-odd employees switching to Slack/HipChat seems like a huge expense. I will readily admit that the issue here isn't as much the cost as much as the people making the decisions thinking that ChatProgramA == ChatProgramB except for ChatProgramA.cost < ChatProgramB.cost where ChatProgramA.cost == $0.
It depends. If you have no current process, $500/mo for this revolutionary extension to your workflow is great.
If you have a current process, an incremental improvement to it might be a hard sell at $500/mo. And I can guarantee that at 1k users, the $15k/mo is going to be a far harder sell than 'use sharepoint/the public file share/e-mail, it works fine'.
If you have hard budget caps and more than 30 employees, it means you're still not going to pay for it this year. This announcement just seems like bad timing. Or maybe they're gearing up for next year.
I suppose that depends on whether the customer thinks they're getting $500/mo of value out of the product :) If they don't, I certainly wouldn't fault them for not buying the product.
It's different when you're adding another person and it's adding an additional 15$/month, and adding an additional 500$/month - even if overall it ends up being the same per person overall for both.
Think of it this way.
If you've got 30 people, you're using this product. Then you add another person.
Now all of a sudden you've got 500$/month expenditures suddenly appearing. The sudden appearance is much more likely to push people to alternative routes than a gradual increase.
It's not much, compared to other expenses, yes. But that's not what I'm saying.
I'm saying that someone is much more likely to look around for alternatives to do something if an expanse suddenly pops up than if an expense gradually does.
Seems like a good point. What it should be is an increased gradient for the next 30 customers, i.e. after 30, each additional is $30 a month, and then after 60, each additional is back to $15. This would get rid of the cliff at 30, but still give you guys the same revenue at 60.
On the other hand, that's exactly what Dropbox for business would cost you, but you don't get the luxury of trying it for free. Also, if a startup is >30 people, they probably have enough $ to afford to pay. 30 people is very, very liberal.
I said a similar thing in another comment thread, I agree it's WAY too big of a jump. Especially since a lot of newer companies are already using Google Apps (so they get storage included, unlimited if they have 5+ users) because it let's them scale up and have fixed costs... 3x that cost/mo for dropbox/gdrive on YOUR OWN hardware? $15/u/mo AFTER 30 seems reasonable but going from $0 (30 users) -> $465 (31 users) is odd....
On startup. It was not connected to a server. I'd be happy to test it again if there's anything I can do to get more useful info to you - it did seem very promising.
I used AeroFS a bunch for private stuff, and it was okayish, but never a really friendly product. I've since transitioned to Syncthing, which is open source (in Go) and actually has better UI in my opinion (at least for my usage).
On an unrelated note, maybe there is something to this "open source (in Go)" phenomenon. I'm starting to think it's more than just a popularity contest, and has something to do with the engineer friendliness of Go.
Edit: But then I looked at syncthing's git repo and thought, nah!
I've actually found building Go (Syncthing, in particular) for the packaging system I use (Gentoo's Portage) a complete PITA, to the point where I don't understand how it can be so broken. And I'm not really a fan of the language itself. Still, people are building some nifty things with it, so there must be something they like!
Really? I'd be interested to know what sorts of issues you ran into. It's always been fairly trivial for me to make PKGBUILDs in Arch for projects that are built with Go.
One of the critical things for me is to have an easy user interface for non-technical people to use. Having a bookmark to manage your files/folders via a web interface seems… annoying, at best. Putting an icon in the menu bar seems more accessible, since people won't have to remember where it went, lose their bookmarks, wonder if it's running, etc.
Yeah, I agree it's currently not that great for non-technical people. Still, I'm excited that I finally have something that fulfills this need for something Dropbox-like but with my own storage that seems to get the job done (including syncing my 50 GB Lightroom collection!) with a UI that makes sense to myself, at least.
My biggest problem with Syncthing is that I don't just want sync, I want a kind of backup built in as well, which Syncthing doesn't do (no support for cloud storage or zero knowledge storage hosts).
At the moment I'm paying for SpiderOak, which does this but another open source alternative that's getting there is Syncany[0], which supports a variety of cloud providers through plugins, versions all files and encrypts data.
There's also git-annex but its plugins aren't always high quality and usability is... Challenging.
rsync.net looks like a great service but it's just not really worth it to me at the moment, I just have too much data for it to be price effective.
With 800GB of data, I can send it to:
- SpiderOak: $130/year (1c/GB)
- Google Drive: $10/month (1c/GB)
- Dropbox $10/month (1c/GB)
- OneDrive $7/month (1c/GB)
- Amazon S3 $24/month (3c/GB)
- Google Cloud Storage $16/$8/month (2c/GB standard or 1c/GB Nearline)
- Rsync.net $160/month (20c/GB)
And that's not even taking the backup providers into account.
I definitely see where rsync.net would shine for business users because it looks like you have great support but for a regular guy who wants to backup his few hundred GB of photos and sync some files it doesn't make much sense.
I like the idea, but the pricing seems unreasonable. $15/mo/user (over 35 users) for what? With dropbox or box at least you get the storage space off-premise. All this does is sync your files across your own hardware.
I'm in a company looking for an enterprise-grade solution for our 5,000+ users, but this quickly became a non-option when I saw the pricing.
> We use Microsoft OneDrive which is bundled with our office 365 license. Pretty good. Strongly recommended.
I'd like to pitch in until the parent clarifies but they probably mean OneDrive and not OneDrive for Business. To anyone reading this, please stay away from OneDrive for Business. It is NOT OneDrive and you will regret using it.
Yeah, I can confirm this comment... We are using OneDrive for Business for various reasons, I strongly advice to stay away from OneDrive for Business if you can...
I'm just looking for a dozen users or so, and $15/mo/user is somewhat expensive, given that I'm providing the server, the disks, the backups, the user support, etc. I'd be willing to pay a few grand a year for my entire enterprise (and I'm seriously considering it), but it's hard to justify ten grand a year for 'Dropbox but authenticated to our LDAP database'.
yuri already chimed in, but if I were ever in a position to be paying over 5k/mo for a service I think I'd be contacting sales no matter what! Startup B2B companies are nearly always willing to work with you on pricing.
What's also unreasonable is that 31 users means 31$15/mo not 30$0 + 1*$15/mo which is disappointing. 30 people is a medium company and I just feel like going from $0 -> $465/mo is a BIG jump.
> I like the idea, but the pricing seems unreasonable. $15/mo/user (over 35 users) for what?
Yeah it seems like a good idea but the value proposition confuses me. Granted I understand most enterprise software works like this but when you have to buy all of the resources to handle the files it sounds really expensive for just some light software.
This is big news. AeroFS is one of the most underused tools available today. It is by far my favorite way to exchange files securely with people; the distant #2 is a "secure data room" hosted on a TLS website, and #3 is PGP-encrypted email.
Or you could buy a Synology like I did and forget paying rent per user. Integrates with LDAP. Comes with a ton of useful software but I bought it mostly for CloudStation and a local file server for large files/collections we didn't want to keep on our workstations or laptops. CloudStation provides remote file sync which we are using to replace Dropbox. Also you can hook up your IP security cams, run a mail server, ftp, iTunes server, whatever... nice web based UX. I'm thinking of buying another smaller one for home.
I recommend AeroFS for anyone that wants to sync computers over their local network in real time. In the past, I used Microsoft Live Mesh to sync files between my desktop and laptop but it was discontinued. Every other application I checked out required uploading data to the cloud first, e.g. dropbox would upload to cloud first then sync over LAN. Other applications, would only upload to cloud and then download from cloud which is a pain for large files and slow internet connections.
On another tangential note: is there anything like this for home users? Say I have 1TB of "stuff" lying around at home (music, movies, photos, docs), and I want to share it: with my GF, across various devices, etc. I want to be able to stream music, movies off of my storage; save/delete files, etc. All securely, of course.
Please do not use OwnCloud. We just got through several months of hell trying to pin down an awful issue with OwnCloud: It eats files. Somehow the server loses track of files and then syncs this state to all the other clients. We went through months of trying to track down what was happening to our business documents, only to be totally shocked in the end that it was OwnCloud itself. This is also a rather open secret among the OwnCloud developers and community. It's just something that happens sometimes, and the "solution" is to use another form of backup (thereby effectively negating the original purpose of using OwnCloud).
If you value the data you are storing, do not use OwnCloud!
I've heard this sort of thing a couple of times but never seen any evidence (specific examples or ways that reliably reproduce the problem, online discussions about it (i.e. on support forums), and so forth).
I'm considering a small OwnCloud install for myself[], freinds & family, so any info you can pass on would help evaluating that. Also, if you can recommend alternatives to look into, that would be nice. What do you now use instead?
[] Actually for my own backups I'll be sticking with my own set of rsync paths that have worked well for quite some time, but OwnCloud will be for sharing stuff and giving people an easy backup option to encourage them to actually have an off-device backup (it'll reduce the "I've deleted X can you get it back for me?" and "my laptop died with all my stuff on it, is there anything you can do?" requests I get!).
Unfortunately, it's impossible to reliably reproduce this problem. If you Google a bit though, you can easily find lots of results for files that magically disappear[0], and not just during upgrades. We were able to pinpoint OwnCloud after making a private folder for one of our guest laptops (which we normally use for interviews and visiting clients, that sort of thing), and then leaving the laptop disconnected for a few weeks. This was a folder no one had access to, and files disappeared and then later this state was synced to the client. It is definitely a problem with OwnCloud.
Perhaps a bit of a stupid question but I've always wondered: how do companies that offer self deployed services like AeroFS or Github Entreprise avoid being hacked by dishonest customers to bypass their pricing plans limitations? Or is that simply not a concern?
People who want free stuff just use Dropbox or other free alternatives. People who use something like AeroFS generally do so because their stuff is important enough to pay money to maintain.
As someone who's trying to figure out this exact situation for one of our teams, I'm not going to try to pirate something and then try to maintain it. I want to be able to call someone and make them help me fix things. I want to know that I'm getting security updates on my appliance. If I wanted to do all that work myself then I would just build it myself from e.g. BitTorrent Sync.
Besides, the last thing you want as a corporation with data so sensitive you want to keep it in-house is to trust it to pirated, unsupported third-party software with no support and then have someone snitch on you and end up getting sued for some huge amount on top of that. Sure-fire way to get… well, fired.
You typically view your licensing schemes as keeping honest customers honest. Also, violating licensing terms like that is not something that any serious company does. All it takes is one disgruntled employee to blow the whistle on your hacking and the 1) IT manager is out of a job and 2) the company is going to have an unwinnable lawsuit on its hands. It's not a risk professionals take.
And it doesn't have to be a whistle-blower. It can also come up while you are trying to get support for a problem with the software. In the log files or something your colleague didn't know he shouldn't say.
The financial and the resource costs of pursuing a licensing violation in court are prohibitive. Especially when it's all based on he-said evidence from a pissed off employee. When BSA/Microsoft do this, it's a publicity stunt with long-term effects, and because of that they have a budget for that. For smaller companies (read - everyone else), the only practical option is to shame violators into compliance.
It's a small sample, but every instance I'm aware of has worked out in favor of the rights holder. Are you saying that infringed companies don't usually pursue the matter, or that they do and are unsuccessful?
My guess is that it's just not a problem worth investing in. They probably only made it somewhat difficult to hack, knowing 1) it's not worth the gain achieved is not really worth the time hacking 2) if someone does hack it, well they were never going to pay anyways... blocked.
We'd actually love to support DigitalOcean. I think I've reached out to them in the past and haven't gotten a response. So, if someone is reading there, send us a bump! I'm at yuri@aerofs.com
http://seafile.com/en/product/private_server/
I've been using it for a few months hosted on a vultr vps. All files are encrypted on the clients, and there are no limits. From what I've seen, it doesn't fall into the upgrade issues that owncloud has seen.
Been using it for close to a year now and very satisfied with it. Only upgraded a couple of times and no problems so far. Major selling points for me: ability to select any number of different folders to sync, ability to connect to any number of servers (i.e. at work I connect to both my personal server and the one which backs up my job related files), seems plenty fast
I actually asked this same question to their support team and was told full iOS 8 compatibility is coming later this year. No hard timelines yet though.
Shame I cannot even browse their web site: paragraph 2 of their terms expressly prohibit it, since I'm acting on behalf of my business. Maybe I'll stick with other solutions.
Same goes with BitTorrent Sync - their current paid-for version 2 expressly prohibits business use. Sigh. Their beta versions also did for some time, despite the fact they solicited business' success stories. People were even crazy enough to link to their commercial web site, using BT Sync products as a fundamental part of their service, against BitTorrent's terms of service.
I'm sorry you found the language confusing, but it's far from the intent (I've actually fired off an email to the lawyers to see if we can clear it up).
Specifically, when you see language like this used by us or other people, the idea is that someone would not be able to come onto your website and use the content or features of your website for the purpose of driving their own business. The main purpose of this is that any commercial benefit from your website should really belong to you.
They are of course free to come onto the website to learn more about and purchase the products and services, which they are then permitted to use under the applicable product license agreement or terms of service.
Thank you for replying so promptly and for taking my concerns into account. When I see language like that used by anyone I stop what I'm doing, unless I'm there for personal reasons. I respect the wishes of other organisations and if they make it seem like they don't want me there, I take it seriously. When people come to me for services, I expect them to take my terms just as seriously.
It is genuinely nice to see terms that are concise, even if on this occasion, I may have misunderstood. I have avoided quite a number of products and services not because I was forbidden to use them, but because of the ambiguity that large, badly-formed documents cause.
If your lawyers and my sense of reasoning can come to a compromise I am still curious about what AeroFS has to offer so will return!
Not sure if this is the best place to ask but is there any chance of custom storage drivers for the Team Server? I'd love to be able to integrate with <insert favourite cloud provider> and I'm sure many businesses would love to as well.
How does it work now? Has the client been rewritten?
I've just been going back over my emails from about a year ago when we decided to stop using aerofs because of stability issues. It doesn't make for pretty reading.
The problems we had were, unfortunately, a little deeper than that.
We had to restart the client again and again to get it to sync. Eventually it gave up altogether.
At the time it took Aero customer support almost 2 weeks to respond. By that point we'd decided to migrate to dropbox.
That was a long time back so hopefully they've sorted out the issues now (with the client and lack of response with customer support). At the time it was fairly obvious to us that we couldn't use them for a key part of our business - it was just too risky.
Sorry to hear you had a bad experience with our support team. Things have gotten much better in this area at our organization. Our average time to respond these days is a few hours.
If you ever decide to give us another shot feel free to ping me, I'd be happy to help you get up and running.
I was really excited by this announcement, until I read the comparison. The 'Free (for up to 30 users)' doesn't include the single most important feature to me: LDAP integration. In other words, I can host it myself, but I'm not actually testing out any of the features I want to try so it doesn't matter anyway. If I want that I have to pay money anyway, so this is completely pointless for me (and, I suspect, others as well).
The data ultimately lives upstream on a corporate file server, so long as you install the "AeroFS Team Server" -- which is the backing storage agent. The Team Server is indeed optional, so you could theoretically just run things in a peer-to-peer manner, but really the recommended environment is to have the Team Server up and running.
None of these cloud storage companies seem to provide a very important feature I can never seem to find in their documentation - file locking. It's the one feature missing that keeps us from using cloud storage.
File locking and remote storage go together like fish and bicycles, sadly. It's impossible with detached-operation cloud systems and only somewhat supported on LAN fileserver systems.
In the architectural industry, we use AutoCAD drawing files that require only one person to open and edit the file. Most cloud storage options don't lock the file when it's being accessed. Other people are able to open and edit the file and therefore the cloud software doesn't know which file was the parent holder and instead updates the file based on the most recent changes.Even Microsoft's Dynamic Cache Service doesn't have a file locking feature. Therefore we need to use something called GlobalScape.
My 2 cents: many file systems do not have a file locking feature that can enforce file locking. In unix-like systems, file locks (e.g., lockf(3)) are "advisory" rather than mandatory, meaning it's up to the higher-layer apps to check whether another program has locked a file and voluntarily stop.
Any apps that do implement this feature likely do so by making the original file read-only and having the first app that opens the file work on a copy. However, I think Windows may have a mandatory file locking mechanism.
AeroFS does allow you to share folders in a read-only way, so that only one-way syncing takes place. If only one user is authorized to edit a file, I think this should work for your use case, no?
> Like Dropbox, but behind your firewall. File Sync and Share for the enterprise. Free up to 30 users.
Boom. I immediately am fully educated about what this does. I wasn't forced to watch a 2 minute video with no sound at work, or to google the product - questioning about why it's popular[0].
This is how you write effective copy.
[0] Notable offenders are yeoman and dropbox itself - both of which, while widely-used products - are completely opaque in what they do from their initial text. "You already know what I do" isn't good enough for people who don't.