Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) vs. OpenText Content Suite Platform

Amazon S3 is a great service to safely backup your data where redundancy is guaranteed and the cost is fair. We use Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Transferring data into Amazon S3 is free but transferring data out has an associated, albeit low, cost per GB. This needs to be kept in mind if you plan on transferring out a lot of data frequently. There may be other cost effective options although Amazon S3 prices are really low per GB. Transferring 150TB would cost approximately $50 per month.

Incentivized

Great for content management and records even for organizations whose staff are not much experienced in the technical backgrounds as it's easy to use and no previous knowledge on HTML is required. It is great for storing invoices and payment proofs and for organizations dealing with global clients for general use documents.

Incentivized

• Fantastic developer API, including AWS command line and library utilities.
• Strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, especially with regards to access permissions.
• It's astoundingly stable- you can trust it'll stay online and available for anywhere in the world.
• Its static website hosting feature is a hidden gem-- it provides perhaps the cheapest, most stable, most high-performing static web hosting available in PaaS.

Incentivized

• Document Management is being done well since it allows you to put in a corporate folder structure that applies to the business unit you currently work in.
• Records Management works well in this organisation as it allows you to classify the document according to the file plan, as well as manage it according to the retention schedule for tat file plan.
• The ability to collaborate on files works really well. You can share with users within your group, as well as allow other users access to the files for either read access to read/write access.
• Access control of the folder and even individual files allows you to ensure only necessary people can have the right type of access. This is especially welcome in the government environment where document management is of utmost importance.

Incentivized

• Web console can be very confusing and challenging to use, especially for new users
• Bucket policies are very flexible, but the composability of the security rules can be very confusing to get right, often leading to security rules in use on buckets other than what you believe they are

Incentivized

• The user interface and configurability of that interface lack a lot of flexibility and modern tools.
• There needs to be stronger and more powerful integration to electronic forms and workflow capabilities which are core to modern ECM.
• Management of audit and content history needs to be modernized and made more dynamic and sustainable.

Incentivized

Due to princing, availability and scalability.

Incentivized

The staff is comfortable with it and I doubt they'd change at this point.

Incentivized

It is tricky to get it all set up correctly with policies and getting the IAM settings right. There is also a lot of lifecycle config you can do in terms of moving data to cold/glacier storage. It is also not to be confused with being a OneDrive or SharePoint replacement, they each have their own place in our environment, and S3 is used more by the IT team and accessed by our PHP applications. It is not necessarily used by an average everyday user for storing their pictures or documents, etc.

Incentivized

The interface is easy to understand and learn quickly.

Incentivized

I never had any issues with access internally or via VPN. But, the response via VPN, was a bit slow.

Incentivized

• I used OpenText nearly every day and I never had any performance issues that I can recall. That said, it's not terribly fast either.

Incentivized

AWS has always been quick to resolve any support ticket raised. S3 is no exception. We have only ever used it once to get a clarification regarding the costs involved when data is transferred between S3 and other AWS services or the public internet. We got a response from AWS support team within a day.

Incentivized

OpenText has an outstanding support and knowledge base. All problems which couldn't be solved by us (high complexity cases) were promptly resolved and the resolution also shared with us.

Incentivized

No, it's pretty easy to implement and use.

Incentivized

Overall, we found that Amazon S3 provided a lot of backend features Google Cloud Storage (GCS) simply couldn't compare to. GCS was way more expensive and really did not live up to it. In terms of setup, Google Cloud Storage may have Amazon S3 beat, however, as it is more of a pseudo advanced version of Google Drive, that was not a hard feat for it to achieve. Overall, evaluating GCS, in comparison to S3, was an utter disappointment.

Incentivized

Having used OpenText Content Suite for a long time, I can say it stands the competition. It offers many versions which is unlike many products in its category. Also, while it is not affordable, I believe the cost is justified considering what a business can achieve with this software.

Incentivized

• It practically eliminated some real heavy storage servers from our premises and reduced maintenance cost.
• The excellent durability and reliability make sure the return of money you invested in.
• If the objects which are not active or stale, one needs to remove them. Those objects keep adding cost to each billing cycle. If you are handling a really big infrastructure, sometimes this creates quite a huge bill for preserving un-necessary objects/documents.

Incentivized

• With OpenText Content Suite, we can easily keep documents safe
• Document collaboration is easy with OpenText
• We can easily handle invoicing and automation thanks to features such as content capture and imaging.
• With OpenText Content Suite, there is better file sync and archiving

Incentivized