I'd easily recommend ownCloud to small businesses or teams within organizations. I've not used ownCloud in large deployments, so I'd hesitate before suggesting it in a situation where more than 10 users need support. That said, ownCloud is easy to set up and multiple instances could be used to service a large user base.
Sometimes we just need to send a single large file, and compressing it is easier than using ShareFile. But generally, we use ShareFile to exchange or send anything over 20 MB. A problem that we have not had [yet], but wonder about is this: Are ShareFile and its e-mailed links safe for transmission to/from U.S. Government computers? All of our public-sector clients are state and locality-based. We haven't had any interacton with U.S. entities. U.S. entities, especially DOD, are rather particular about these type of file-sharing sites and links embedded inside e-mails.
Attention and dedication to making the product a world class product with continual product updates.
Ease of use from an administration standpoint, and a very Clear UI.
The price -- you can't beat free!
Mobile applications are great.
Integration with public S3 cloud providers like AWS S3 and Wasabi S3.
2FA authentication is supported and works great!
Marketplace Add-Ons: I love this! For example, I can install an add-on that natively opens raw images. I am a photographer as well, and being able to quickly view the CR2 Raw Files direct from the camera is fantastic! This was made possible by a marketplace add-in.
Embedded Media Players: Photos, Music, and Video files can be viewed and played right in the browser window.
Sync application to keep local files on a computer updated with the files on the server.
Access control and permissions -- shareable links!
Authenticated electronic document signatures--self-signing, and sending out for signatures. This is a robust feature that also allows for additional information to be added to documents being sent for signatures, such as dates, notes, and items omitted but needed.
Encrypted emails through ShareFile, Citrix apps for Outlook, Gmail, and Mac email systems. Encrypted email messages cannot be cut/pasted, nor forwarded without encryption. If only the attachments need to be encrypted, the email message can be unencrypted. Also, two options for securely opening an encrypted email (one with less credentials, one with more).
Inability to easily collaboratively edit the same document by several people. Some advances have been made with Collabora (Libreoffice online) but it is still very sub-par compared to Office365 and desktop/online Office editing Sharepoint or OneDrive documents.
Apps for Calendar and Contacts are not part of the basic core, and although now quite supported they cannot still be easily deployed in common email clients such as Outlook or Thunderbird, separate CalDAV and CardDAV plugins need to be installed. Embedding an email solution and plugins for major email clients so they can work just by entering username and password would be good.
Risk of moving important folders/files to another location just by random drag-and-drop on Windows. Sometimes this breaks public links that cannot be restored anymore. Reverting such mistake by any of the users is impossible automatically.
When some user deletes some data in a shared folder it is put into recycle bin of the owner of the folder. The user who deleted cannot himself/herself revert such action as he/she does not see the recycle bin (trash) of the owner. Also, there is no log in the recycle bin who deleted that file or folder.
The cost is fair and the program does what it has promised to do. Customer service is attentive. I'm not aware of any better-sounding file sharing systems out there that would tempt us to discontinue ShareFile.
OwnCloud is easy for me to use, and I believe it would be for others too. The barrier for most people will be the set up. For a technology professional like myself, ownCloud's setup is pretty straightforward, but it's not the sort of thing most casual users will be able to handle. Also, it's on the user to maintain the service. These can be taken care of by paying someone to do it for you.
ShareFile is so easy to use I was able to download all of my projects files and have them set up to sync before my supervisor could even come over to explain the process to me. It is a neatly organized and intuitive software that allows even the less tech-savvy to become power users.
Compared with other cloud services, ownCloud has been the most efficient. It doesn't create a noticeable drain on resources and very quickly syncs across all my devices. I'm usually able to save a file on my laptop and by the time I walk over and sit down at my desktop machine, it's already there. I don't need to wait as often as I have with services like OneDrive.
Easy to use, easy to integrate with Outlook. I only gave it a 9 because I have found that sometimes it does not play nicely with Outlook and can slow it down. But, when that happens (not frequent), I restart Outlook and all is well again
Regarding the community edition, there is a reasonably good support on the IRC, forums and in the issue section on Github. Perhaps a much more individual approach would be available if the premium support was chosen and the instance of the server was provided by the Owncloud company that also offers some premium extensions, not available generally. However, we did not need this level of support yet.
Typically the support is very knowledgeable and interested in following an issue until it is fully resolved. I have not had any issues working with their staff as they are all polite and easy to communicate with. If the first or second level tech does not fix the concern then it is escalated until we get to someone who can close the case.
Good documentation for the API. With a little help from RS tech staff, any competent programmer should be able to integrate RightSignature with an existing system in a week or three. That help is easy to get as well
The paid cloud services are expensive if you need a lot of data. You're giving your personal and business information to a data-hungry organization. Local NAS solutions are too slow. We run ownCloud on an older business PC and the performance is outstanding, even for remote access, due to local syncing.
ShareFile is easier and does what you need. I have moved a few organizations from SharePoint to ShareFile. Just easier. You can setup different areas for different departments, setup their permissions and it is easy enough for them to do what they want in their zones. The mobile app works great as well. So you can all the features you really use from SP, but just easier to setup and use.
It's been huge in allowing our freelancers to upload a doc or email comp into the system and initiate a workflow so that those inside the organization can provide feedback without the need of staying on top of emails/messages. It's all located in one place.
The time suck from the previously-mentioned annotations issue has caused me to lose some productivity as I have to 'wait my turn' to drop in an annotation, then have it removed, and re-attempt multiple times. Not a huge impact on ROI, but it does affect productivity.
From the product side, it is helpful for me to reference what the content will be on our website before the page goes up, as well as the copy we send to our retailers who resell our products. Our marketing lingo stays even across all touch-points because of ShareFile.
