Anyone here using Owncloud?

ajf

ajf

Soldato
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Just wondering if anyone has used this open source cloud storage in their organisation?
https://owncloud.com/

Just after feedback for install, ease of use etc.
I assume it can be both internal and external facing, so that clients can also download and upload files?
 
Yup, it's alright but has a few niggles, usually the community version, have not really had experience with the enterprise but heard it is the same roughly.

It sometimes suffers from the occasional hiccup with the client software and local syncing. I.e. misreporting the amount of space available and refusing to sync based on 0GB being available.

On occasion from the client it won't sync all files properly or will crawl the same files on occasion. Discovered it uses a file comparison system which sometimes has issues with volume shadow copy.

When you use AD integration, it doesn't really like LDAP signing as assigned by group policy (depends on your group policy and security settings within your domain).

It can be great when you need to share lots of the same files between people and have them work remotely. Most of our experience is through the clients (Mac, Windows) through remote usage. Works better than DirectAccess most of the time when sharing a large number of constantly updating files between a group of people.

It is easy to use when things work, but if you encounter problems where it simply refuses to upload files to the server or re-upload it can be frustrating. On the odd occasion it does seem to ignore permissions and give access denied on certain user created directories if you use the encryption component.

Depends on what you want to use it for really. We went back to Sharepoint after using it because it didn't really fit our needs, again we had previously used Sharepoint and all our internal staff knew how to use that.
 
Thank you for the comments.
Is there actually any functional difference between the community version and the paid enterprise version?
It seems to be mainly support and the mobile apps that it adds.
All we want is something that staff can add files to so that external clients can pick them up through a shared link or email - like you can with dropbox.
No syncing required.
Occasionally maybe for clients to add files too.
Would be helpful to restrict access to files to specific internal users though.

Currently we have to open up access to Dropbox and various other file sharing sites as required to specific staff which is a bit of a pain.
Looked at ftp but feel that is a bit messy for the client as often ftp access is blocked on networks (we do for instance!).
 
We use this, still in early stages - mainly designers and marketing, but they love it - saves them using wetransfer etc to get big files out.

Got it sitting behind a rproxy with SSL, the mobile app buildable yourself if you know how to compile meaning the community is as good as the paid if you don't mind not having support.

Files are stored in a non-encrypted fashion which as root you can access easily, so backing it up is just the same as backing up any Linux server.
 
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